An interesting perspective...
June 18, 2019
Written by
Kelsey Donk
If you've used
any computer or mobile app recently — hello, that's all of us — you've probably
been asked if you wanted to switch to "dark mode." Maybe you
immediately made the switch and felt your eyes relax. Maybe you didn't, and it made
you wonder if this dark craze makes any difference at all to your eyes. The
short answer to this question? Like many things in science, the quick answer
is, "Maybe."
Battle of the
Brightness
A lot of
factors are at play when it comes to the relative lightness and darkness of
your screen. Consider the shifts that might happen over the course of the day
and the content you consume. In the morning — maybe even before the sun rises —
you might read the news. That means dark surroundings and a bright white
screen. During the day, maybe you work on spreadsheets or Word documents in
bright light. And at night, you might browse Netflix on a dark screen
background amid your dark surroundings.
These
circumstances play differently in terms of the strain they cause on the eyes.
Scientists tend to take their base rule from your typical middle-of-the-day
work: light screen, dark text, bright surroundings. That's how most of our
screens looked before the advent of "dark mode." In the middle of the
day, when surrounding light is high, dark on light is ideal. In one of the few
studies on the subject, researchers found that people read more easily and
retain more information when text is formatted this way. Contrast makes details
easy to see, and the study authors noted that most readers are used to reading
dark on light, anyway.
Another reason
a white background makes things easier to read comes down to the biology of the
human eye. White reflects all of the colors on the spectrum, which means that a
white background keeps the pupil from opening wide to let in more light, which
would make it harder to focus. But there's also a quirk in the human visual
system that makes your eyes overreact to light objects on a dark background,
which can make white text on black seem to bleed into the page and make it
harder to read.
It's Different
in the Dark
In a dark room,
things seem to change. A white screen with black text certainly feels like it
puts more strain on the eyes, though the science on this isn't conclusive.
While you'd think your pupils would shrink to pinpricks when flooded with the
white background of a standard webpage, at least one study found that not to be
the case: When you compare different room brightness conditions, the size of
the pupils actually changes less when people look at a dark-on-light color
scheme than it does when they look at light-on-dark. And like we mentioned
before, a wider pupil means worse focus, so even in dark conditions, it may
still be better to go with dark-on-light for long passages of text.
Still, what the
limited science says and what the general public seems to experience are
currently two different things. Before dark mode was introduced to the larger
world, gamers were the ones concerned with eye pain in the dark. They often
used special glasses to mask blue light and put ambient lights behind their
screens to make white backgrounds less painful. As screens became more
ubiquitous — and more of us started to read our phones before bed — the rest of
the electronics-loving world started to demand a dark color scheme.
If you log on
to your favorite sites right now, you'll probably find they've taken the hint.
Twitter's optional "night mode" switches the display to white text on
shades of dark blue. It's almost perfect for use in a dim setting. Reddit's
night mode uses light gray on a near-black background. And Netflix has relied
on white text over black and gray for years. But at least in brightly lit
rooms, it's best to set your favorite sites to the easiest setting for your
eyes: dark on light.
Though the
scientific verdict is still out, using a dark-mode setting could possibly help
your eyes hurt less when you use them in the dark. Just follow your comfort and
switch things up if you start to feel strained.
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To see how your
eyes can fool you, check out "The Ultimate Book of Optical Illusions"
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