Himalayan Glow Salt Lamp Review: Warm Light for a Reading Nook

The smallest bedroom in our 1950s ranch has a reading chair, a yoga mat, and a shelf with three books and a clock on it. For the first two weeks of January it also had a problem. One overhead fixture, one window facing the neighbor's garage, and by five in the afternoon the whole corner sat in shadow. I could read in there at two o'clock and not at five. That was the entire complaint, and it was enough to make me stop using a room I had spent a month clearing out.

I bought the Himalayan Glow salt lamp with the touch dimmer in the first week of February and set it on the shelf beside the chair. I have used it almost every evening since, going on nine months now. It is the one thing in that room I would buy again without thinking about it, and it is also a product with more marketing wrapped around it than it deserves. What follows is the practical version: what it does, what it does not, and the two small things about it that still annoy me.

How I've Used It

The lamp sits on the shelf beside the reading chair, roughly level with my elbow when I am sitting down. I switch it on when the afternoon light goes, somewhere between four thirty and five depending on the month, and it stays on until I go to bed around ten thirty. Most nights I never move it off the lowest dimmer setting. In nine months I have moved the lamp itself twice, both times to dust the shelf underneath it.

Dale is not a lamp person. He walked past it for a week without comment, then said it made the room look like a hotel, which from him is praise. Since then he has asked me twice to turn it on while he reads in the living room with the overhead off, and that is as close as my husband comes to endorsing a purchase.

The part I did not plan for is that the lamp changed when I use the room. Before February, the quiet room was a morning room. Coffee, ten minutes on the cushion, out. Now I am in there after dinner too, because there is light at knee height and no reason to reach for the ceiling switch. That is a small thing to get for the trouble. It is also the entire reason I bought it.

What the Touch Dimmer Actually Changes

The lamp is rated at 5 watts and uses an LED, so even at full brightness it is dimmer than the shaded lamp on Dale's side of the bedroom. If you are picturing a lamp you could do a crossword under, stop now. If you are picturing something closer to a candle that happens to run on electricity, you are in the right neighborhood, only steadier, with no flicker I have been able to see.

The control is a touch dimmer. You tap the switch to step through the brightness levels rather than turning a knob. I have never counted how many levels there are, because I have never needed anything above the bottom third of the range. What I can tell you is that the difference between the lowest setting and the one above it is real. Plenty of dimmable lamps have a bottom setting that is just full brightness with a mood label on it. This one goes genuinely low, low enough that I have walked back into the room and not been sure at first whether it was on.

That matters more than it sounds. The problem in that corner was never darkness. It was that the only light in there came from the ceiling, and a ceiling fixture at night turns a comfortable chair into an examination room. Light at elbow height, aimed at nothing in particular, fixes that without changing a single thing about the room itself.

The problem in that corner was never darkness. A ceiling fixture at night turns a comfortable chair into an examination room.

Size, Weight, and the Shelf Question

The lamp measures 4.5 inches deep, 4.5 inches wide, and 7 inches tall, and mine weighs in at the low end of the five to seven pounds the listing gives. To picture it, it is shorter than a hardback novel standing on end and heavier than it looks, because it is a rock with a light in it. The base is wood, the finish is smooth, and the whole thing sits flat on a tabletop.

The weight is the first thing to think through. Five pounds on a floating shelf is fine. Five pounds on a bracket someone installed in a hurry in 1962 is worth a second look, and our house is full of those brackets. Mine sits on a built-in shelf that used to hold a set of encyclopedias, so I did not think twice, but I would have if it had been a shelf over my head.

The footprint is the other half of it. 4.5 inches square is smaller than the base of most table lamps. It fits on a windowsill, a nightstand, a side table, the top of a low bookcase, the corner of a kitchen counter that never gets used. It will not light a room. It will light a corner, and it does that without making the corner feel taken up.

Nobody Warns You That Each One Is Different

The stones are hand chipped, which means the lamp you get will not be the lamp in the photo. Mine has a broad flat face on one side and a rougher, stepped face on the other. I turned the flat face toward the chair and the rough side toward the wall, and it looks deliberate. If it had come out the other way around I would probably have rotated it too, so the variation cost me nothing.

What it does cost you is the option of two matching lamps on two nightstands. If symmetry matters to you, this is the wrong purchase, and no amount of shopping around will fix it, because the variation is the product. The upside is that the lamp looks like an object somebody found rather than an object somebody molded, which is exactly why I wanted it on a shelf beside a chair and not on a bedside table next to a clock radio.

One practical note from nine months of living with a salt stone: a little grit collects under the base. Not much, and not all the time, but enough that I set the lamp on a small tray the first month and have not had to think about it since. A dry cloth takes care of the stone itself. Damp cloths and salt do not mix, and the listing says the lamp is not water resistant, so I keep it away from the bathroom and the kitchen sink.

The USB Cable Detail

Here is the part I would want to know before ordering. The lamp draws power through a USB cable rather than a standard two prong plug, which means you need a USB adapter or an open USB port within reach of wherever you want to put it. I had a spare adapter in the kitchen drawer, so this cost me a minute and nothing else. If the only outlet in your reading corner is across the room, this detail decides the entire purchase, and it sits further down the listing than it should.

The cable on mine runs from the base, off the back of the shelf, and down the wall behind a curtain. I have not thought about it since February. But I would not want to be the person who ordered this, waited for it, opened the box, and found out they needed one more thing. Consider this the note I did not get.

What This Lamp Is Not

It is a light. That is all of it. Salt lamps get sold with a great deal attached about air and ions and how a room feels, and I am not going to repeat any of that, because I have no way to check it and neither do you. What I can tell you is that the room feels calmer with a small warm light at knee height in it, and that would be true of any small warm light in that spot. I chose the Himalayan Glow version because I liked the look of it on a shelf and because nearly 28,000 other people had already taken the risk ahead of me.

It is not water resistant. The listing says so plainly, and it means dry dusting only. Ours lives nowhere near water, but I wiped it with a damp rag exactly once, before I read the listing properly, and then I stopped doing that.

And it is not a reading light in the sense a retired librarian means. Large print and a low setting, and I am fine. Small print in a magazine at nine at night, and I turn on the overhead like everybody else. If you want to do the crossword in a dark room, this is not the lamp for that job.

The Two Things I Would Change

The lowest setting could go lower. Even at its dimmest the lamp has more presence than a candle would. At nine at night, with the house quiet and Dale already asleep, I sometimes want a light I can barely see, and this is a shade brighter than that. It is a mild complaint about a lamp that already goes lower than most things sold as dimmable.

The touch switch is easy to set off by accident. Twice now I have brushed it with the dust cloth and turned the lamp on in the middle of the afternoon. A switch that responds to touch is exactly what it says on the box. I just did not think through what touch meant until I was standing there at two in the afternoon wondering why the shelf was glowing.

Who This Is For

This is for the person with one corner that does not work after dark. A reading chair, a bedroom dresser, the end of a sofa, the floor of a room where you stretch in the morning. Somebody who wants a low warm light and does not want to install anything, hire anyone, or think about it again. Somebody who would rather have a light that looks like an object than a light that looks like a lamp. If that is you, the Himalayan Glow salt lamp does the job, and it does it for a long time without asking for anything.

Who Should Skip It

Skip it if you need actual light. This is a 5 watt LED behind a stone, and it will not light a page of small print, a knitting pattern, or a room. Skip it if you want a lamp you can switch on from the doorway, because the only control is on the lamp itself. Skip it if there is no USB port or adapter anywhere near the spot you have in mind. Skip it if you want two matching lamps on two nightstands, because each stone is hand chipped and yours will not match your neighbor's or the photo. And skip it if what you actually want is cleaner air, because this is a rock with a bulb in it, and I would rather tell you that now than have you find out in March.