The Philips Hue light starter kit is the best gift idea I have this year. Both of my kids are getting them for their rooms. They have never read my blog, so I’m not at all concerned about saying that here 🙂 I got one for Christmas last year, and can’t believe I haven’t shown it to you yet. It’s simple to use light bulbs that work on wifi that you can make 16 million colors. I love technology, and can generally figure it out, but I won’t pretend to be able to explain it really well here. But here is a basic explanation – you put the bulbs in your lamps, plug in the base in a central room, download the app, and you’re done!
Here they are at the best price on Amazon:
You can also get at Best Buy (here) and Target (here), although I don’t know why anyone would buy them anywhere other than Amazon ($139 vs. $200).
And here is what it does. These are all a cabinet in my kitchen, where I can change the light color in seconds with the app:
You can also make each bulb a different color. This was fun for football games, holidays, etc., where you make the lights red and green, for example. You can make as many colors at the same time as you have bulbs:
They are totally dimmable. You can see this better at night, but here is an example:
You can even take a photo and match the lights to it. My favorite is taking a sunset photo and telling the lights to match it. They also suggest some preset light schemes, like this. You just click it and your lights match the sunset (or tons of other scenes):
It works with Alexa, so you can say “Alexa, make kitchen lights red,” or “Alexa, set kitchen party lights,” etc.
Here is another example of the lights in my living room. You can effectively change the paint color on your walls with these lights. The purple is for fun, but when you look at the second two, you can see warm vs. cool and how it changes everything:
And here is what the app looks like. You just click your room and then slide the color to what you want on the color wheel. It’s so easy:
You can even make the lights change live with the scene on the tv or video games, although I have’t gotten to that yet. I think my son is going to love that:
They are seriously the coolest tech product around, and aren’t at all hard to work. I simply love them.
Here are some more examples from the manufacturer. I don’t love any of these rooms, but see that they are trying to show off the lights rather than show a beautiful room (although I wish they’d do both!). In reality, I use them for much more subtle changes and think they are a must for people who love decorating:
Cool, right? Here they are again at Amazon:
One quick note: I showed you these in the starter kit. You can also add on up to 50 bulbs onto one base, so therefore up to 50 rooms. They also sell ones that are just white light, so you can go from warm to cool, but not change the color. They make outside lights, kitchen strip lights, and hundreds of other things. Here is the full line:
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