Narrator: Yeah, you recognize this.
Do you have one in your home?
Do you have more than one?
I have four in my one-bedroom apartment,
including this one that's now home to a dead roach.
If I can be honest, I hate them.
Call it Freudian if you want, but they just collect dust,
they're an insect graveyard, and they're just ugly.
So I'm gonna start replacing them, and along the way,
I'm going to find out,
why boob lights are on the ceilings of so many homes.
Why are they everywhere?
Why are they designed like that?
And with all of your options when it comes
to how to light your home, why?
Just, why?
I don't get it.
All right, let's be fair.
We're gonna call it by its G-rated term
which is a flush mount dome light fixture.
but speak to any lighting designer or a contractor,
and then they're gonna call it exactly what you think.
In pursuit of answers, I spoke with Charles Brill,
co-founder of designer lighting manufacturer
Rich Brilliant Willing.
Brill: 'The boob light', it has a really simple construction
It's usually a plastic or opaline glass sphere
with a little threaded nut in the middle
that kinda holds the glass in place
and allows you to easily re-lamp the light fixture.
That style of fixture, a sphere,
a dome, with a perimeter metal
is basically the bare-bones construction
method of a flush mount.
Narrator: The term for materials like these
is builder grade, an inexpensive construction solution,
as long as you're not the one living with it.
Flush-mount fixtures are super-popular in construction
because then you don't have to deal with
hanging chandeliers or worrying about
how low lights are gonna hang in a room.
There are thousands of flush-mount designs
from hundreds of companies.
The lighting industry in general is booming,
reaching $43 million in revenue in 2019,
and boob lights are some of the cheapest,
especially if you're buying in bulk.
Look, I can get a pack of six for $40.
But frugality can't be the only answer, can it?
Who designed this and decided this looks great on a ceiling?
To find out, we have to go back in time...
- or to your local craft bar.
You recognize these, though: Edison bulbs!
They're the trendiest thing now, but before 1904,
they were the only name in the light-bulb game,
and they kinda sucked.
They were powered by a carbon filament
that wasn't very bright but burned hot.
Not a great thing to enclose in a diffuser
and shove in the ceiling.
Fire inspectors would not have approved.
Builders usually hung them from ceilings but kept
them low, in pendant lights.
Then as cities grew, builders looked for ways
to light smaller rooms with shorter ceilings,
and their prayers were answered by the improvement
and mass-production of the incandescent light bulb,
in the early 1900s.
Invented in Britain and developed by William Coolidge,
these bulbs swapped the hot, dim carbon
filaments with a tungsten filament.
The new bulbs burned much cooler and were bright enough
to be installed right next to the ceiling.
Builders also loved installing flat-mount light fixtures
newfangled concrete-based homes
because they didn't have to install hardware
in the concrete ceiling.
Designers like Virden, Beller, even Sears and Roebuck
created fixtures in this new style.
Early flush mounts played around with the design,
often relying on screws around the edge
to keep the diffuser in place.
Finally, around 1930, perhaps as a result of some
new technology making hardware smaller,
an anonymous light-fixture designer discovered
that the finial could be placed at the center of the dome.
This secured it in place, making it easier to swap out
bulbs, and changed history forever.
After that, it was game on for the boob light.
The growth of the suburbs during the '50s saw a
surge of construction and secured the light's position
on hardware store shelves.
Through the decades, styles came and went,
but one thing stayed the same:
This was the cheapest option.
If you were building a house on the cheap,
your ceiling had a boob light.
"So what", you may be thinking - and you're right.
Besides being distracting, there's nothing
wrong with relying on a boob light.
The targeted lighting for a 100-square-foot living space
is 2,000 lumens, which a flush-mount will do fine,
but it's one source.
From a lighting-design perspective, they're kind of basic.
Brill: When you start with a room with only a flush-mount,
the ambient light is created through the flush-mount.
To really define a space,
you want to be able to wash the walls,
to define the perimeter of the space.
Work with floor lamps or other track lighting
that have a focal light to feature textiles
on your sofa or an area rug.
Narrator: At the end of the day, it's not that I have
anything against boob lights, it's that lighting,
like everything, is an art form.
It should serve as both form and function,
and it's fine to design a light that
stands out or blends in, but this does neither,
which just makes it so much more confounding
that they're everywhere.
It's impossible to talk about lighting
in 2020 without mentioning LEDs.
They've been changing the game since the early 2000s.
As of 2018, LEDs own 76% of the lighting market.
As more new homes are built,
the slim, barely-there profile of low-power LEDs
will inevitably push out the bulky boob light
as the default ceiling light in newer homes.
If you live with boob lights and you like them, you do you.
But don't be afraid to consider alternatives.
See what your local lighting shop has in stock.
If the wiring is intimidating,
there are even diffusers and shades
that can fit easily over the existing fixture.
But if you're feeling HGTV vibes,
swap it out, even if you're in a rental.
Just remember to turn off the breaker.
It does wonders to individualize your living space.
Just store the boob somewhere safe
and swap it back in if you do end up moving.
Chances are, you'll probably be swapping out
a boob light again real soon.