Ever wondered how those viral TikTok ‘Sunset’ lamps work? Here’s what is inside them…





YouTuber BigCliveDotCom calls it a low-power floodlight using “undesirable LEDs”.

Whether you’re on TikTok or even on Instagram, chances are you’ve stumbled across these ‘sunset’ LED lamps. They’ve pretty much shot to popularity over the last month or two, known for creating a perfect circular projection of ambient light, looking like a sunrise, sunset, or even a circular radial gradient of the rainbow spectrum. Influencers are sharing pictures about it, VICE even wrote an entire article on it, and it’s been plagiarized so many times over, I honestly don’t know who the original creator of this lamp is. What I DO know, however, is that it isn’t worth what it costs.

How the TikTok Viral Sunset Lamp works

The sunset lamp can be basically broken down into three components – the LED, the lens, and a dichroic film that helps get that unique color-gradient. Both the lens and film are made of plastic, and the LED is a basic off-the-shelf component that barely costs a couple of cents when purchased in bulk. To be brutally honest, perhaps the most expensive part of the Sunset Lamp is its shipping fees… but enough product-bashing. Let’s just look at how the lamps work, and how you could potentially build your own for under 5 bucks.

How the TikTok Viral Sunset Lamp works

The way the lamp works is similar to a floodlight, or a car’s headlamp – an LED emits light, which is focused using a lens. Similarly, the sunset lamp uses a small 3W LED along with a dome lens, that refracts the light beams in the shape of a perfect circle. Given that car headlights need to be bright, they even use reflector panels to ‘multiply’ the light, but that isn’t really the case with a sunset lamp that’s more focused on creating an ambient ring of soft light. The Sunset Lamp does, however, come with a special dichroic film that’s glued to the back of the lens (you can see it in the teardown image below) that creates that unique gradient. Different lamps use different films, creating everything from an orange halo to a light yellow one, to even those psychedelic rainbow gradients. The dichroic film changes color depending on the angle at which a beam of light hits it – causing that halo effect with colors changing from the center towards the edge.

How the TikTok Viral Sunset Lamp works

What you’ve got at the end of the day is quite a masterclass in branding too. Calling it a low-intensity floodlight wouldn’t move as many pieces as calling it a ‘sunset lamp’ does. It’s easier to grasp, sounds more poetic, and resonates well with its audience – the same way a ‘Retina Display’ sounds much better than a ‘display with high pixel density’. Couple that with the fact that the lamp absolutely took off on TikTok and it really helps explain the product’s sheer success.

If you still find the idea of a Sunset Lamp rather intriguing but you don’t want to spend an average of $25 to buy your own, you could easily build one using parts available online. Just look for a good ‘condenser lens’ on the web (they come for a bunch of cents on AliExpress) and pick up a cheap nightlight from your nearby hardware shop and you can practically put together your own sunset lamp for a couple of bucks. You can get your hands on dichroic film from a gift shop too (just test out those metallic gift-wrapping papers) or better still, just take a marker to the back of your dome lens and color it in.

Or if you’re just plain lazy, go ahead and buy one off Amazon.

How the TikTok Viral Sunset Lamp works

How the TikTok Viral Sunset Lamp works

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These Stonks collectible figurines celebrate the biggest Reddit vs Wall Street memes of the year!

Can you believe the Salt Bae phenomenon was literally 4 years ago?? The internet knows how to move fast, quickly flitting from one topic to the next, and this year we can all agree that the GameStop saga had everyone’s attention. It started with the Reddit group r/WallStreetBets banding together to take on hedge-funds that were targeting the share price of GameStop, a brick and mortar game retail store. While the hedge-funds had shorted the stock massively, an entire warrior-clan of Redditors decided to buy the company’s stocks, taking them so high that multiple hedge-funds went into severe losses.

Far be it for a design site to discuss market speculation, but here at Yanko Design, we’re more captivated by these adorable vinyl figurines that were born out of this modern financial revolution! Say hello to Stonks and his alter-ego Stinks, two collectibles from Youtooz that stand at 5-inches tall and perfectly embody the pop-culture element of this movement. Clad in the classic suit and tie, while standing in front of an arrow chart that either indicates growth or decline (or a bull or bear run if you’re fancy), Stonks and Stinks are memes brought to life, and I honestly have never wanted something so ridiculous this bad! Both figures are a part of a limited-edition and are priced at $30 each. Grab one before their value quadruples on eBay!

Designer: Youtooz

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Thought that was a MacBook? Look again, it’s a hybrid iPad Pro!

If you’ve read our long-form piece on the 2018 iPad Pro, you’ll get a pretty good idea of exactly how powerful it is. With an 8-core GPU that’s designed to perform as well as the latest XBox, a 7-core CPU that’s capable of intense heavy-lifting, FaceID, battery that lasts all day, a touchscreen with a stylus, and even a Type-C USB port that lets you hook the iPad to practically anything, the iPad Pro is just as good as a MacBook Pro, if not better. In fact, probably the only visible difference between the two is the difference in OS… and the fact that the MacBook Pro packs a keyboard. Or rather, ‘packed’ a keyboard.

Designed to turn your tablet into a reliable, powerful, laptop-esque device, Brydge’s keyboard for the iPad Pro fixes onto the device at the corners, and swivels open and closed just like a laptop’s hinge would, with the ability to adjust at any angle. Dock the 2018 iPad Pro in, and its bezel-less design practically makes it behave a laptop, along with Brydge’s keyboard.

The people at Brydge have done some exceptional work creating a keyboard that truly looks and feels like a laptop, rather than a flimsy tablet-accessory. The keyboard body comes milled from aerospace-grade aluminum and even comes in silver and space gray that match Apple’s hues. It features a beautifully functional (and complete) backlit keyboard with three levels of backlight intensity, and also packs a great deal of key-travel that is sure to feel MUCH better than the MacBook’s horrible butterfly keys. The keyboard even replicates the MacBook’s aesthetic with the signature cutout at the lip… and perhaps the best feature of all, it comes with an entire year’s battery life. Sadly, there’s no trackpad on this one, but you’ve literally got a touchscreen display, so that definitely shouldn’t be a problem.

Designed to transform the iPad into a true hybrid, the Brydge sees the iPad Pro for what it is… a tablet that is capable of being an incredibly useful laptop, but is just one step short. Brydge’s keyboards help complete that step, giving you the ability to own a tablet that is perfectly capable of being your work machine… and is also a couple of hundred dollars cheaper than Apple’s laptops! Plus, with Brydge’s lifetime warranty, what more could one possibly need?!

Designer: Brydge

Click Here to Buy Now

Click Here to Buy Now

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