Lighting without the jargon

A Simple Guide to Lighting

Choosing some lights should be simple.

Then you meet fairy lights, string lights, LED strips, COB, RGBIC, warm white, cool white, battery, mains, solar, smart controls and several different things all apparently called “Christmas lights”.

Most of it makes sense once you know what each type is actually for.

This is the short version.

Start with what you want the light to do

Before worrying about LED counts, apps or acronyms, think about the job.

Decorative lighting is mainly there to be seen: fairy lights around a mirror, globes across a wall or lights woven through a plant.

Ambient lighting helps create the general feel of a room or outdoor space.

Task lighting is more practical. Under a kitchen cabinet, for example, you care much more about useful white light, brightness and colour quality than whether it can flash purple to music.

Seasonal lighting includes Christmas trees, windows, rooflines and outdoor displays.

Then there is effect and smart lighting — colour changes, animations, music sync, app control and lighting that reacts to a television.

The same LED technology can turn up in several of these. The difference is often how it has been packaged and what it has been designed to do.

THE NAME STAYED. THE TECHNOLOGY CHANGED.

Fairy lights and string lights

Fairy lights are the small individual points of light arranged along a wire that people have been putting around trees, windows and bedrooms for decades.

You’ll also see them called string lights. In the UK both terms are still widely used, and in practice they often describe the same basic thing.

Older sets commonly used tiny incandescent bulbs. Electricity passed through a fine filament inside each bulb, heating it until it glowed.

Modern fairy lights are now overwhelmingly LED. LEDs use much less electricity, produce far less waste heat and last much longer than the old filament bulbs. They have also made small battery, USB and solar-powered sets far more practical.

The basic idea hasn’t changed much.

What has changed is what you can do with it.

Modern fairy lights can be tiny LEDs on almost invisible copper wire, conventional strings, decorative globes, clusters, curtains or shaped lights. They can run from the mains, batteries, USB or a solar panel and range from a simple steady warm-white glow to app-controlled multicolour effects.

If what you want is individual decorative points of light, fairy lights are usually the place to start.

Explore our Fairy Lights guides

A LINE OF LIGHT RATHER THAN A STRING OF POINTS.

LED strip lights

LED strip lighting puts lots of LEDs onto a long, narrow flexible circuit board.

It can sit under a kitchen cabinet, behind a television, around furniture, under a bed or inside an aluminium profile.

But “LED strip” covers several quite different technologies.

RGB strips combine red, green and blue LEDs to create colours.

RGBIC adds separate control sections, so different parts of the same strip can show different colours at once.

RGBW and RGBWW add dedicated white LEDs rather than creating white purely by mixing red, green and blue. RGBWW products may offer a broader range of warmer and cooler whites.

COB — Chip on Board — packs LEDs much more tightly together beneath a continuous-looking surface. Instead of seeing a row of obvious individual dots, you tend to see a smoother line of light.

That can matter enormously under cabinets, along shelves or anywhere the strip itself — or its reflection — is visible.

If you want a continuous line of light, start with LED strips rather than fairy lights.

Explore our LED Strip Lights guides

CHRISTMAS DESCRIBES THE JOB, NOT THE TECHNOLOGY.

Christmas lights

Christmas lights aren’t really a separate type of light source.

Most modern Christmas lights are LEDs too. What makes them “Christmas lights” is the way they are arranged and used.

A conventional tree string is basically a fairy-light string. Cluster lights pack far more LEDs into a shorter distance for a denser effect. Tree-ring or drop-over sets hang vertically down the tree rather than being wrapped around it.

Icicle lights use hanging drops for rooflines and windows. Curtain lights create a larger illuminated area. Window lights may use stars, snowflakes or other silhouettes, while outdoor Christmas sets can cover everything from hedges to entire rooflines.

So when choosing Christmas lights, shape, coverage and installation method can matter just as much as LED count.

Explore our Christmas Lights guides

Warm white, cool white and colour

“White” light isn’t one colour.

Warm white has more yellow and amber in it and is closer to the look people associate with traditional incandescent lighting. Around 2700–3000K is a common warm-white range.

Cooler whites become cleaner and less yellow as the colour temperature rises. Around 4000K looks more neutral, while higher colour temperatures can look distinctly cooler.

These numbers describe colour temperature, not brightness.

Some lights offer tunable white, allowing you to move between warmer and cooler shades.

Colour-changing lights introduce another set of terms. RGB produces colours by mixing red, green and blue. RGBIC allows multiple colours to appear along the same strip or string simultaneously.

There isn’t one universally correct colour.

A warm glow around a fireplace and useful light over a kitchen worktop are doing very different jobs.

LED count isn’t brightness

A big LED number looks impressive on a box, but by itself it tells you very little.

Five hundred LEDs spread across 50 metres gives you a very different look from five hundred LEDs concentrated into a much shorter run.

For fairy and Christmas strings, we often look at LEDs per metre as well as total LED count. It gives a better idea of how dense the finished display will look.

With practical lighting such as kitchen strips, lumens become more useful because they describe light output.

And even then, brightness isn’t everything. Diffusion, beam angle, colour temperature and colour rendering can all change how useful or attractive the light looks.

Mains, battery, USB or solar?

Mains-powered lights make sense where you have convenient power and expect long or frequent use.

Battery lights remove the need for a nearby socket, but the battery box still has to live somewhere and the batteries eventually need replacing.

USB-powered lighting can be convenient around desks, televisions and other places where USB power is already available, although the power supply still needs to be suitable for the product.

Solar lights are useful where running power outside would be inconvenient. But the solar panel matters as much as the lights: shade, short winter days and poor weather can all reduce how much energy is available after dark.

None is automatically best. The useful question is simply:

“Where is the electricity going to come from?”

Timers, remotes, apps and smart lighting

A timer can be more useful than twenty flashing modes if the lights are somewhere awkward to reach.

A remote gives basic control without getting your phone out.

An app may add schedules, scenes, custom colours and more detailed control.

Smart-home support can add Alexa, Google Home, Apple Home or Matter integration depending on the product.

These features can make lights much more convenient or entertaining.

They don’t automatically make the light itself better.

A simple fixed-white strip with good light quality may be exactly what you want under a kitchen cabinet. Behind a television, sophisticated colour control or screen synchronisation may be the whole reason for buying the product.

Indoor and outdoor lights

If lights are going outside, look beyond the word “outdoor” on the box.

An IP rating tells you something about protection against things such as dust and water, but one lighting set can contain several separately rated components.

The light string may have one rating.

The controller may have another.

The solar panel, battery box, power supply or plug may have another again.

So we don’t treat one impressive-looking IP number as permission to leave every part of the product exposed to British weather.

Follow the manufacturer’s instructions for each component.

So which type should I look at?

Small decorative points around a room: Fairy lights
A smooth line under kitchen cabinets: White or COB LED strip
Colour around a bedroom or furniture: RGB/RGBIC LED strip
Lights around a Christmas tree: Christmas tree lights
A roofline or window Christmas display: Icicle, curtain or outdoor Christmas lights
Outdoor lighting without a convenient socket: Solar or battery lighting
Lighting that reacts to a television: Dedicated TV backlighting
App control, scenes and automation: Smart lighting

Still not sure?

That’s fine.

Start with the space you want to light rather than the technology. Our individual guides explain the products, specifications and trade-offs that actually matter once you know the job.

What SimplyLit does next

Knowing what the terminology means is only the first step.

Our buying guides look at specific products using manufacturer specifications, retailer information and buyer feedback. We compare the things that actually affect everyday use rather than awarding a winner because one product happens to have the largest number on the box.

Better lights. Less messing about.