People ask why everything I make is so dark. My blog, my shop, my home and the things I wear, draped in black and ember and shadow. The honest answer is that the dark is not a costume I put on to seem moody. It is how I can actually function, and it doubles as something I genuinely love, and those two things turned out to be the same choice.

I get migraines, and a bright, white screen can tip a manageable morning into a lost afternoon, the kind spent in a dark room waiting for my own skull to settle. Dark mode is more than a style flourish for me. It is the difference between doing my work and not. And it runs deeper than screens, because I dress in black and dark tones, keep my rooms dim, live in low warm light by choice, and over time I stopped experiencing that as a limitation and started experiencing it as an aesthetic I treasure. The gothic, vampy look of my whole life is not me making the best of a hard thing. It is a real preference that happens to also be an accommodation, and I think a lot of people share some version of it without ever having been given permission to take it seriously. So I built my entire world in the dark, my home, my website, my shop, this blog, because the dark is where I can see, and where I feel most at home. Here is how, room by room and screen by screen, with the actual tools that make it work.

A quick note: some links below are affiliate links, which means if you buy through them I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only mention things I believe in. It helps keep this work alive, and I’m grateful for it.

My screens: dark mode everywhere

The single biggest change anyone can make is using dark mode everywhere possible. Most phones, computers, and browsers have a system-wide dark mode in their display settings, and turning it on at the system level flips most of your apps at once instead of hunting through each one.

For websites that stay stubbornly white, a browser extension can force dark mode onto them. The free extension Dark Reader is the one I rely on, and it works across most sites, letting me read pages without the white-page assault. This is also exactly why I designed my own site and shop dark by default. I never wanted a single visitor with eyes like mine to hit a wall of glaring white the moment they arrived.

Turning the brightness and the blue light down

Most people run their screens far brighter than they need. Lower the brightness more than feels right, give your eyes a few minutes to adjust, and the dimmer setting is usually perfectly readable and far more comfortable.

Then look for a warm or night-shift filter, which strips the harsh blue tones and shifts the screen toward a gentler amber. Many light-sensitive people find this much easier on the eyes, and you can set it to run all day, not just at night. If even the lowest built-in brightness is too much, dig into your accessibility settings, where many devices hide an extra-dim or reduce-white-point option that goes darker than the normal slider allows.

For a physical layer of help, I also use blue-light-filtering screen protectors on my devices [blue light screen protector], which take a bit more of the harshness off before it ever reaches my eyes.

The lighting in my home: warm, low, and a little vampy

This is the part people are most curious about once they see my space. I do not like to use bright white overhead lighting. It is the cold blue-white kind that is roughest on sensitive eyes, and it stacks with screen strain until a flare arrives. Here is what I use instead.

Warm-toned bulbs throughout, labeled warm white or soft white rather than daylight [warm white bulbs]. They change the entire feel of a room and the entire load on your eyes.

Red bulbs in some rooms, which give that deep, moody, gothic red glow I love [red light bulbs]. Beyond the vampy aesthetic, very dim red light is one of the gentlest options for sensitive eyes in the evening, because it carries almost none of the harsh blue wavelengths that strain them, and it does not jolt you the way white light does when you are winding down.

Smart bulbs and dimmers, so I can tune the light down on a bad day without committing to one brightness forever [smart bulbs]. On a high-pain day I can drop the whole house to a low amber from my phone without standing up.

Lamps aimed at the walls instead of a glaring overhead fixture, for soft indirect light that is gentler and, not incidentally, far more beautiful.

Blackout curtains for the daylight [blackout curtains], so I decide how much sun reaches me on the days my eyes cannot take it.

What I carry for the lighting I can’t control

Out in the world, in stores and waiting rooms and other people’s bright kitchens, you do not get to pick the lighting. So I bring my own buffer.

Red and rose-tinted glasses are the thing I never leave without [red tinted glasses]. These high-density deep red lenses in particular is one a lot of migraine sufferers rely on, and mine take the edge off bright and fluorescent spaces enough to get me through them. They also, conveniently, look exactly as gothic as the rest of me.

A brimmed hat, which does more than people expect to cut overhead glare. I like this cute black lace hat, since it kind of reminds me of a hat you would see in Bloodborne [black lace brimmed hat].

And on the worst days, a genuinely dark, screen-free rest in a quiet room, which is the one tool no gadget replaces. I keep a sleep mask within reach [sleep mask] for exactly those collapses.

When the accommodation becomes the aesthetic

Somewhere along the way, living in the dark stopped feeling like coping and started feeling like identity. I lean all the way into it now. In fact, I ended up making a shirt that just says I wear black because light hurts, which is among the most honest sentences I know about my own life, half explanation, half subtle defiance. It is the featured image on this very post, and it lives in my shop along with the rest of the small dark things I make for people who live the way I do. If that line lands for you, it might be your sentence too.

That is the turn I want you to take from all of this. The dark you may have been treating as a limitation can become something you actually choose and love. The accommodation and the aesthetic are allowed to be the same thing.

An honest note

None of this is medical advice, and real light sensitivity, especially the kind tied to frequent migraines, is worth bringing to a doctor, because it can be part of something treatable and you deserve more than coping tricks. What I can tell you is that these are the measures that made my own days livable, and that you are allowed to take your light sensitivity seriously even if no one has ever validated it for you. The strain was real the whole time, and easing it is self-care.

That is why everything here is dark, and how I keep it that way, from the screen you are reading this on to the red glow in my bedroom to the glasses in my bag. It is care made visible, in the only colors that ever let me see my own work clearly, and it turns out to be a world I would choose even if my eyes gave me the option not to.

Part of an ongoing series at Between Battles on living well in a body with real limits. Step further into the world, and find the small dark things I make, at emberosis.com.

From the Emberosis Armory

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