It’s a combination of factors: you must reduce both blue light and intensity of light to avoid suppressing melatonin. Just reducing blue light might help a little, but it still suppresses melatonin. Melatonin levels and circadian phase shifts scale with total irradiance even if blue-depleted; basically, dimming the lights is really effective.

That’s why our products focus on both intensity and color change (but we lead with blue light reduction since it’s easier to grasp).

Also, if you look at our specs, you’ll see that we don’t use pure amber or red light; we use very low-blue white light with high color rendering. We have yet to do the study on this, but you can read surprisingly well with our lighting at a very low intensity (enough to make your mom angry that you are hurting your eyes), whereas with lower CRI sources, you would have to make them brighter to achieve the same visual acuity.

There is some emerging research that IR may play a role in melatonin production locally in cells, which is why we added it to the bulb. Early days for this scientifically, but Scott Zimmerman and associated researchers suggest wideband IR may be effective, even if it’s only 20-30% of the visible intensity.