If you’re reading this, it’s too late.
Unless you’re wearing glasses and serums expressly engineered to block them, millions of tiny particles of high-energy visible (HEV) light have already travelled from the screen of your phone, iPad, or laptop down to the deepest level of your skin, where they are already beginning to work their opposite-of-magic, decomposing the collagen and elastin necessary to ward off wrinkles and keep things firm and lifted.
The degree to which this matters depends on the amount of time you’re spending under HEV’s cool blue gaze—and your level of buy-in to the consumerist vs patriarchal arms race designed to keep you in hot pursuit of the face of a 24-year-old until the day you die.
But HEV (street name—blue light) isn’t just a hazard to vanity. Along with its ability to give you crows’ feet from mainlining Twitter while the world burns, scientists have long warned of blue light’s negative impact on everything from mood to sleep to eyesight.
At the risk of a few more rays, allow us to explain just what blue light is, why it’s harmful, and how you can protect yourself from this distinctly modern malaise.