The Amber Glow That Finally Made Our Reading Corner Feel Finished

The chair was the easy part. I found it in January at a shop on the east side of Rockford, and Dale helped me get it into the truck. I put it in the corner of the smallest bedroom, the one I have been calling my quiet room since I retired. Then I sat in it for three evenings in a row and felt like I was sitting in a storage unit with one nice piece of furniture in it.

The problem was the light. That room has a single ceiling fixture, and turning it on at seven in the evening was like flipping a switch at the library front desk. Everything went flat and white and the corner stopped feeling like a place to sit. I tried a floor lamp. Too tall, and the shade threw a hard circle on the wall. I tried a small table lamp from the hall closet. Same problem, just lower down. What I wanted was one low light I could leave on while the rest of the house went dark.

What I bought in the first week of February was a Himalayan Glow salt lamp with a touch dimmer, the 5 to 7 pound size. It sits on the little shelf beside the chair, which is about the only horizontal surface in that room. I have used it almost every evening since, and nine months in, it is the thing guests ask about before they ask about the chair.

Here is the part I want to be plain about, because the listings for salt lamps get carried away. It is a light. It does not clean the air, it does not do anything to the air at all, and I would not tell you otherwise. What it does is glow at a level that lets me read a page and still feel like the day is winding down. That was the whole job. It did the whole job.

The numbers, since I am the sort of person who writes them on the back of a receipt: it is 4.5 inches deep, 4.5 inches wide and 7 inches tall, it weighs about 5 pounds, it runs off a USB cable, and it draws 5 watts. The dimmer is a touch switch, and after a week of fiddling I found the setting I use every night, which is close to the lowest one. I turn it down, I sit, I read two or three pages, and then I go to bed at 10:30.

It is 4.5 inches square, it draws 5 watts, and it is the only thing in that room I have not wanted to change.

Each lamp is hand chipped from salt stone, so the one that arrives is not the one in the photograph. The Himalayan Glow lamp I received has a flat spot on one side and a chipped corner at the top, and the shelf hides both. If you are the sort of person who needs the object to match the picture exactly, buy it somewhere you can see it in person. If you want the glow, the shape matters less than you think it will.

Water is the one real caution. The listing says plainly that it is not water resistant, so it does not belong next to a humidifier or under a window that leaks, and I dust it with a dry cloth on Sundays when I do the rest of the room. Salt and moisture do not get along. That is a fact about the material, not a knock on the lamp.

It replaced nothing, which is worth saying. That corner had no light at all before February. The plain white shaded lamp on Dale's side of the main bedroom is the comparison I keep coming back to, because I have lived with that one for years. It is brighter and it is better for folding laundry. It is not better for the twenty minutes before sleep, and I did not understand that until I had both in the house.

Dale's verdict, for what it is worth, was that I had bought a rock with a cord. Then he started touching it on when he came through that room at 5:30 in the morning, before the overhead light, and he stopped mentioning the rock.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I would tell you to buy it for the light and nothing else. Not for the air, not for your health, not because someone online said it would change your evenings. Buy it because a room with one low warm light in it feels different from a room with a switch on the wall, and that difference is real.

I would tell you to measure the surface first. Mine is 4.5 inches square on a shelf that is 8 inches deep, and it has room to spare. If I had put one of the wide ones on a base the size of a dinner plate up there, it would be on the floor by now, and I would be telling you a different story.

And I would tell you not to expect the photograph. Ours is one hand chipped stone with its own lumps and its own crooked top, and after nine months I do not see any of that. I see a corner of a room that finally looks finished when the rest of the house is dark. That is what I paid for, and I would do it again.