A founder's unexpected journey from horticultural lighting to a discovery about our own eyes
When I started Grow Gang, I became obsessed with one question: what do plants actually need from light?
The answer led me down a rabbit hole of photobiology, spectral science, and LED technology. I spent years studying photosynthetically active radiation (PAR), comparing grow light spectrums, and watching how plants responded to different wavelengths. I learned that plants don't just need "bright light" - they need specific colours in specific ratios. Miss a critical part of the spectrum, and growth suffers. Photosynthesis stalls. The plant survives, but never thrives, or lots of energy is wasted.
What I didn't expect was that this obsession would eventually change how I think about the other light in my own home.
The Plant Light Reasearch
If you've ever looked at the spectrum of sunlight, you'll notice it's remarkably smooth. From deep violet through blue, cyan, green, yellow, orange, and red - natural daylight delivers a continuous, balanced distribution of wavelengths. Plants evolved under this light for millions of years, and their photosynthetic machinery is tuned to harvest energy across the entire visible spectrum.
A cheap grow light might produce plenty of lumens, but if it's missing key wavelengths, your plants know. They stretch. They pale. They underperform.
When you understand this, you start looking at light differently. You stop thinking about "brightness" and start thinking about whether it’s the right light for your plants.
The Question I Couldn't Shake
I'd started noticing something. In the evenings when I sat down to read under my bedside lamp. The page seemed harder to focus on. My eyes felt tired faster.
I just assumed it was just end-of-day fatigue. But the question kept nagging at me: if plants need a particular spectrum of light to thrive, what about us?
Eventually, curiosity got the better of me. I pulled up the spectral data for the LED in my reading lamp and compared it to a natural daylight graph, and started reading around the issue.
There was a gap. A significant dip right around 480 nanometres - the cyan part of the spectrum, sitting between blue and green.
The Cyan Gap Problem
Here's what I learned: most white LEDs work by coating a blue or violet LED chip with yellow phosphor. The phosphor converts some of the blue light into longer wavelengths, creating what appears to our eyes as "white" light. But this conversion isn't perfect. It leaves a characteristic valley in the cyan region - typically between 470-500nm.
To our conscious perception, the light still looks white. We don't notice anything missing. But our visual system evolved under sunlight, and it uses cyan wavelengths for some surprisingly important tasks.
Cyan light helps regulate pupil size. It contributes to contrast sensitivity. Some research suggests it plays a role in reducing visual fatigue. When cyan is absent, we compensate - our pupils work harder, our eyes strain more, and over time, reading becomes less comfortable.
I'd spent years ensuring my plants received every wavelength they needed. Meanwhile, I'd been using lights which lacked cyan for my own eyes, and also had too much blue light without even knowing it.
From Plants to People
Once I understood the problem, I couldn't ignore it. I started measuring the lights in my home, my office, and comparing what was available. The cyan gap was common. Even expensive "high quality" reading lamps had the same spectral hole.
I found a few products marketed as "full spectrum" for human use, but when I obtained their spectral data, most still used violet-pump LED technology that shifted the gap rather than filling it. Others were clinical-looking devices that wouldn't fit in anyone's living room.
I realised that what I'd learned about plant lighting, the importance of spectral completeness, the details that manufacturers overlook, the gap between marketing claims and measured reality, applied just as much to human lighting. Perhaps more, given that most people have no idea what their reading light is actually emitting.
A New Direction
This personal curiosity eventually led me somewhere unexpected. In my own time I started researching human centric lighting - a completely different field with its own standards, its own technology, and its own challenges.
What I found was that the principles I'd learned about spectral quality translated across, even if the application was entirely different. Plants need PAR. Humans need something else, but the underlying lesson about spectral completeness still applied.
That exploration eventually became Mornington Studio, a separate venture focused on reading and task lights designed specifically for human vision. The first product, the Clarity Task Light, uses dual-blue-pump LED technology that genuinely fills the cyan gap, is practical, so you can position it where you need, but also looks good.
It's a strange journey, from helping people grow plants to thinking about how we read comfortably. But sometimes one interest sparks another, even if they end up in completely different places.
What This Means For You
Whether you're growing plants or simply trying to read a book without tired eyes, the lesson is the same: don't trust the label. "Daylight" LEDs aren't daylight. "Full spectrum" often isn't. The only way to know what you're getting is to look at the spectral data.
For your plants, that means choosing grow lights with verified PAR output and complete spectral coverage. For yourself, it means questioning whether that reading lamp is actually giving your eyes what they need.
I never expected my horticultural lighting obsession to change how I think about human vision. But sometimes solving one problem reveals another - and that's where the interesting work begins.
Lorenzo is the founder of Grow Gang and Mornington Studio. When he's not measuring spectral graphs, he's probably reading, under properly lit conditions.
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