LED bulbs can damage paintings | Hacker News Reader

LED bulbs can damage paintings

vrt.be

9 pointsCGMthrowaway7 comments

The description of LEDs as a monolithic device makes me strongly doubt the conclusion reached. Alas, there's no link to the paper to see how they addressed the wildly varying types of LEDs and why other types of bulbs emitting a similar spectrum wouldn't have the same issue.

Edit: oh jesus, this article is from 2013.

This appears to be the paper: https://hal.science/hal-05385645v1/file/Monico%202025.pdf

[edit]: this is clearly not the paper, as it was published in 2025, and the hn link is from 2013. Regardless, it makes only passing mention of commercial LED, certainly nothing that supports the claims in the article, nor does it mention in the paper body anything that appears to be referencing previous analysis of the lighting, so the search continues.

This is the 2013 paper [0], which won the SILS-SPECS PhD Award.

[0] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ac302158b

That's apparently only one part, and that particular part contains no mention of LEDs at all.

Edit: I've also looked at parts 2 and 4, which also contain no mentions.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21314201/ is part 1, and talks about the artificially aged samples, but again doesn't appear to contain anything about LEDs specifically.

I'm not sure I want to spend a whole lot more time on this; everything I've read suggests they're looking at just plain old “light causes reactions, here's the specific reactions that occur with pigments containing these compounds, see how they're sensitive to these particular wavelengths?”, none of which is particular to the source of those wavelengths; specifically, I see no reason why an incandescent bulb of similar temperature light wouldn't also carry those same wavelengths, nor why it would be a property of LEDs, when the output spectrums of common LEDs vary widely.

Interesting research certainly, but not anything that supports the hn title.

The "Portable Raman" is an LED device.

Is it? My understanding is a Raman spectrometer is a laser-based device. Either way, it's almost the furthest thing imaginable from a commercial LED lighting fixture that still emits light: “Raman spectrometers can damage paintings, so do not use them for museum lighting.”

Yeah I doubt it

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