Review: Skyview 2 Wellness Table Lamp

Go ahead, look around you. Chances are, you're reading this indoors, and artificial light is raining down upon you. Even the screen on which you're reading these words is splashing artificial light into your eyeballs. All of it is a very different recipe of light than the sunlight the human body evolved to thrive in.

The Skyview 2 is a unique lamp that claims to mimic a gradually shifting sunlight, all the way from sunrise to sunset. It's made to help you forget that you're cooped up in a box of walls all day.

Photograph: Biological Innovation and Optimization Systems

Light affects our circadian rhythm. You feel more restless and tired throughout the day without the normal range of natural sunlight. Sunrise alarms help you fall asleep by mimicking a setting sun over a short period of time, calming you by reducing blue light levels. And in the morning they help you wake up by mimicking a rising sun, giving you that melatonin boost from a gradual increase in blue light.

Light therapy lamps are similar, but they don't simulate the sunrise. You use them in the morning to give you a strong dose of blue light to set your circadian rhythm, boost energy levels, and alleviate seasonal affective disorder. To get the full effects, you just sit about a foot away from one for at least 30 minutes as soon as you wake up in the morning. The effect doesn't work if the lamp is across the room.

The Skyview 2 incorporates elements of sunrise and therapy lamps, but is neither. It's designed to stay on all day and make your entire room look more naturally lit. At sunrise, it gradually brightens to ease you awake, and at sunset, it gradually dims to prepare your body for sleep. You don't have to sit close to it, but it also doesn't provide as much of a boost to your serotonin levels as a light therapy lamp. Think of it as less clinical, more environmental.

It took only a minute to unbox and set up the Skyview 2 in my New York City apartment. I consider myself lucky to have a window in my living room in this city, but it's still not quite enough. I often keep a few LED lights on during the day to fill out the rest of the room and keep myself from falling asleep. For a sunny apartment bursting with natural light, the Skyview 2 would be unnecessary.

Positioning it took some trial and error. While it throws light evenly in 360 degrees and upward, I had the best result placing it on a shelf over my desk. Light splashed downward over my workspace and bounced off the wall and ceiling to coat my living room. It's not so bright that you'll mistake it for overhead lighting or a strong ceiling lamp, though. I also still felt like I needed other lamps in my room.

There's one control mechanism on the lamp itself—a dial that you spin to adjust brightness and push to change the color routine and turn it on and off. Everything else goes through a phone app, which can be kind of clunky. The setup screens do a fine job quickly explaining how to set when the sunrise and sunset routines begin.

You can choose for the lamp to follow the natural sunrise and sunset times based on your location, which in most of the world changes a little day by day. Or you can set custom times in the app. I didn't want the lamp's sunset to begin at 7:30 pm every day, so I set my sunset to 9:30 pm. As night fell each day, the lamp would slowly reduce its blue light, just as a normal sunset does. It signals your body to start winding down and readying for sleep.

You can also set how gradually the lights fade in and out, respectively—up to an hour—and the brightness and temperature of the light. The lamp can be connected to Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant if you'd like to integrate it into your smart home, but it isn't required.

I did have some issues. Sometimes the light routine got stuck when I plugged in the lamp or turned it on, and I had to toggle one of the four “schedule override” settings on and off to get the lamp to enter its preprogrammed routine. These overrides let you set the light for a specific task, including sleeping, reading, relaxing, and working.

Using it outside your bedroom is also odd. Assuming you don't live in a dorm room or a studio apartment, you'll have to carry the Skyview 2 into your bedroom each night and plug it into a wall so that the sunrise function wakes you up in the morning. It won't do you any good if it's going through its sunrise routine in some other part of the house where you're not sleeping. But then you'll have to pick it up and move it into another room—an office, the living room, or wherever you spend much of your day—to benefit from its all-day light-shifting pattern and sunset routine. If you find yourself annoyed or slowed down by small tasks like that, it's something to keep in mind.

The lamp itself is built well. The wide, metal base prevents it from tipping over from anything less than a good whack, and the light enclosure is so thick you could probably knock down bowling pins with it. The lens is frosted enough that I could look right at it without blinding myself. It also stayed cool to the touch, no matter how long it'd been on 100 percent brightness.

Photograph: Biological Innovation and Optimization Systems

I enjoyed the effect throughout the day. It's difficult to say whether I'm experiencing a placebo effect or the light really is helping, but emotionally, it was nice to have a bit of light variety throughout my day between sunup and sundown.

Cooping yourself up indoors all day under the same flavor of unchanging light from dawn to dusk is weird and unnatural. For folks in a room without a window, the Skyview 2 could be a godsend.

But at $449, it's a pricey godsend. A Philips Hue A19 White Ambiance Smart Light Bulb costs $26 and you can screw it into any lamp and program it via the intuitive Hue app to mimic sunrise routines, sunset routines, and the shifting light throughout the day. And you can buy more than one of them. For this sort of money, the Skyview 2 should do more. For example, if it were bright enough to negate the need for other lamps in my living room, then I'd have a slightly easier time justifying the price.

You pay a premium for the Skyview 2. Does it work? Yes. You can create a similar effect with smart bulbs. But for a plug-and-go solution, it sure was a novel way of pretending that I lived in a bright and sunny apartment, if only until my time with the Skyview 2 came to an end.