Hollywood’s depiction of the movie star’s dressing room shows the ideal situation – a makeup mirror at a comfortable countertop completely surrounded by incandescent lights, producing a bright, evenly illuminated area in which to do hair and apply makeup.
Replicating this design at home is expensive, inefficient, and can actually be dangerous.
Most people apply makeup, shave, and perform other personal grooming tasks in the bathroom. Incandescent bulbs can be hazardous when placed so close to a sink, and at very least will require ground fault protection by most electrical codes. And in terms of power consumption, they will be very inefficient, consuming hundreds of watts of electricity any time they are on, which might not only be when they are directly used for grooming purposes. This can make their installation even less efficient. A “wall” of light bulbs will be an inefficient and unappealing method to light an entire room.
And then there’s the complexity of installation. To retrofit a bathroom with this type of vanity in a conventionally built house will require additional wiring, and might involve removing the wall surface to recess the lamp holders.
Enter LED light strips. They are an excellent way to achieve movie-star quality mirror lighting, with almost none of the downsides that incandescent bulbs bring to the application. LED lights provide even illumination, and their color rendering is very similar to incandescent and considerably better than CFL. Their unobtrusive design makes them blend in with your décor much more smoothly than large, ungainly light bulbs, and makes them far less susceptible to breakage, because they will sit flush to the wall.
They are very easy to install and wire, and will bring excellent functionality to your bathroom mirror, without making it difficult to use it as a bathroom mirror.
