I realised today that President Trump is correct. New LED lighting does (or rather can) indeed make your skin look orange, but that may be a symptom of another problem.
Let me explain. You may know that daylight has a bluer hue than old fashioned tungsten “light bulbs”. It’s the reason you used to get “daylight” and “tungsten” color slide film variants. Well you can broadly get three types of domestic LEDs. The simplest and cheapest are the direct replacements for the old tungsten or compact flourescent bulbs.These are available in broadly two color temperatures to match daylight or the color of old tungsten filament bulbs. They are often marked “cool white” or “warm white”.
Now we get fancy. The direct replacements for the old screw-in bulbs are also available with controls which can radically change the color of the light from a range of “whites” to pure red, green or blue , together with a range of intermediate colors controlled by a remote control or a phone app. Typically the latter can also link to smart speakers like the Amazon Echo or its Apple or it Google equivalent. The different colors are achieved by mixing different levels of light from the RGB elements — much in the same way your TV reproduces different colors by varying the brightness of the dots on the screen.
But there is another type where there are only “cold white” or “warm white” LEDs so you can vary the tone of the lighting to fit your mood. Now I have an LED light fixture which has strips of LEDs with alternating warm or cold white LEDs. You can also dim the whole. The strips are within a luminaire or light fixture with a diffusing screen so you do not notice the individual spots of light.
What I have found is this last variant has a lot “warmer” warm color LED in the strip than you normally get in the other sorts. So it is possible by dimming the warmest setting to get a very orange light which, in turn makes everything seem orange, including your skin.
Here’s the thing — has anyone told Donald that you can vary the color as well as the brightness of these lights or indeed that you can dim them? Even if they had, would it have sunk in to the “wonderful property developer” who does not understand that toilets flush using water stored in a cistern. So if you do have a low supply, it just take longer for the cistern to fill? You can pump the handle 15 times or as many as you want while it’s filling, all you do is flush down what has managed to collect in the limited time between pumps on the handle.
The next question therefore becomes — who keeps turning all the light fixtures to orange? I have long thought that Melania’s fashion gaffs are deliberate on the part of her “dresser”. She has repeatedly demonstrated that she is a clothes horse with little or no style or understanding of how to dress. It goes back to the days when she occasionally wore fashion clothes for photographers.
So my theory is that someone or a small group of staff at the White House are going round adjusting all the LED fixtures to give him that orange look. Maybe it’s Miller so Donald does not go all out on the burnt ochre make-up and the cunning stunt has backfired. Whichever way, there is indeed an element of truth in Donald “LED bulbs make me look orange” claim but by making it Trump shows just how uniformed and un-tech savvy he is.