Perhaps you've just invested in your first vintage lamp, or you've ordered that beautiful VL pendant you've had your eye on. You head to a big box store to find a bulb, and the choices are...a lot.

You don't want to put a bad ugly bulb in a beautiful piece of lighting. Step away from the cool white and follow our guide below.

A brief history:

Incandescent bulbs have a filament that gets hot and glows. While the warm white light they cast is beautiful, incandescents are wasteful, need to be replaced often, and get very hot, which limits their use in lighting made from wood, paper, or even metal. Incandescents were formally phased out in the 2000s with the onset of LED technology. (No, we don't source incandescents, and no, we will never encourage you to find them and put them in lamps today).

LED lighting has improved a lot in price, look and options. Two Enlighten stocks select Tala bulbs. These LEDs fit all sorts of lights, are carbon-neutral, and look beautiful - think of Tala bulbs as the "buy it for life" version of LED bulbs. Philips and Feit also make solid LED bulbs at a lower price point, but their "dim-to-warm" is a bit less refined than Tala. (More on that in a future post...)