Everybody Hates Boob Lamps, But They’re Actually Good Lamps

While standing on a street corner in New York’s Lower East Side last Wednesday night, I couldn’t help but notice all the boobs. I was looking up at rows of soft-glowing windows on an apartment building. The rectangular panes framed views of boobs on the ceilings of each unit. These boobs were emanating the warm yellow light that makes apartments look so much cozier from the street. These boobs were, in fact, lights. Hear me out on this one: Boob lights are actually good lights.

Boob lights are the kind of thing you will never escape. They’re those flush-mounted ceiling lights in every apartment you’ve ever rented. They’re the light fixture of choice for practically all hallways. They’re a ubiquitous, infamous, breast-like invention—and people love to hate them.

Designers, for one, do not hesitate to call boob lights ugly. “They are cheap, unattractive, and look like giant breasts hanging from the ceiling,” writes an interiors blogger. “Breasts are very useful and brilliantly designed anatomical features. I just don’t want my home to be illuminated by them,” writes another. One designer says it’s her duty to rid the world of boob lights. Even this very website has referred to them as the “dreaded boob lights, marring apartments and builder-grade homes everywhere with their unrepentant mediocrity.”

What’s so bad about mediocrity, anyway? Mediocrity is the very thing landlords love about them. Benjamin Ross, a landlord and real estate agent, based in San Antonio, Texas, says it’s not uncommon for tenants to damage or even steal a unit’s light fixtures.

“For some reason, no one ever bothers with those cheap flush-mount lights,” Ross says. “The rental market is scorching right now, so as a landlord, I do not need to go the extra mile to impress a prospective tenant. Bottom line: Boob lights are cheap and easy to replace.”

The origins of the boob lamp are a bit murky. Designer and architectural historian Bo Sullivan estimates the first one was illuminated in the 1890s, when electricity was first being installed in homes. Before that, gas or kerosene lamps were a room’s primary source of lighting, and they wouldn’t have been installed so close to the ceiling for fear of starting a fire. As electricity caught on—and houses were built with lower ceiling heights—light fixtures that fit tight to the ceiling became more relevant, explains Sullivan. Thus the boob lamp was born.

The introduction of the tungsten filament bulb in 1907 helped boob lamps become more common, Sullivan says. They burned brighter using the same amount of energy as earlier bulbs, which allowed lighting designers to get creative by etching designs into a lamp’s glass. By adding the glass bowl over these new (and, at the time, expensive) bulbs, it protected them from damage and theft, and distributed light evenly across a room.

Boob lamps come in all shapes and sizes, but their most commonly found iteration has a rim, a glass bowl, and a finial. With most boob lamps, the finial is integral to the light’s design. (As the lamp is to a boob, the finial is to a nipple.) Boob lamps have a threaded rod down the center of the light fixture, which a glass bowl is placed over. The finial, affixed to the rod’s end, holds the glass onto the fixture. While there are other boob lamp models with decorative finials—or no finials at all—Sullivan estimates most boob lamps today are manufactured in the way described here.

This is to say that a boob lamp’s design is almost purely functional.

“Nature designs in many ways that we do, and nature finds shapes that make sense for the job they have to do,” Sullivan says. “In many ways, they’re still playing by the same rules, whether it’s a breast or a lighting fixture. You want a certain amount of material to enclose a certain amount of volume as efficiently as possible. There’s a functionality within that construction that makes sense to happen: Right in the center.” 

Surely people have noticed the lamp’s striking similarity to the female anatomy over the years. Boob lamps are what art historian Jules Prown would call “structural metaphors.” In his essay The Truth of Material Culture: Fact or Fiction?, he explores how physical objects can subconsciously evoke feelings or memories. In one example, he notes that, when viewed from above, teapots resemble female breasts. 

Prown says this could mean maternal love is a teapot’s repressed structural metaphor. In that sense, perhaps lighting designers of the 1890s subconsciously created a lamp that gave them motherly comfort.

It’s not totally off-base. MEL Magazine highlights a post in the /HomeImprovement subreddit. “Our baby LOVES boob/nipple lights,” writes the Redditor. “It’s saved us during many a screaming session in his first few months. He takes notice of them and immediately calms down.”

Sullivan isn’t convinced structural metaphors are the driving force behind the design. Instead, he says, the function of the lamp dictates its nature-inspired shape.

“You might say, ‘Why aren’t the shades square?’ Well, it’s not as efficient to make a square piece of glass as it is to make a bowl-shaped piece of glass,” he explains. “Why aren’t breasts square? Well, for the same reason.”

The boob lamps adorning the ceilings of today appear a bit more watered down than their 1890s counterparts. With less ornament comes more efficiency. 

“Most products get introduced with new technology and a lot of flash and bang,” Sullivan says. “Then there’s market pressure to make it cheaper and cheaper and easier to produce. [The boob lamp] has sort of devolved into its most simple form.”

If you ask me, a cheap, easy-to-produce fixture in its simplest form sounds like it’d be right at home in the Bauhaus. Formed in 1919, the German art school championed simplicity, functionalism, and mass production.

It straddled the lines of art and industry, using craft to create “useful and beautiful objects,” per the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The boob lamp fits squarely into those design ideals with its mass-produced simplicity and touch of high art (what is the female form if not art?). I’ll say it: I think, were he alive today, architect and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius would be a fan of the modern-day boob lamp.

Plus, as minimalism continues to resonate with millennials, it’d make sense they’d opt for a utilitarian ceiling lamp—or at least opt out of replacing it. 

“It’s no more decorative than it has to be,” Sullivan says. “But it’s not more maximalized in its minimalism either. It’s cheap to produce but doesn’t [display] any extra efforts beyond what’s required.”

Their price point—$15.97 a pop at Home Depot—bolsters their appeal further.

“You won’t find high-end boob lights,” says Laurel Bern, an interior designer based in Westchester County, N.Y. 

That’s exactly the point. They’re the common man’s lamp—the common woman’s lamp, rather. As the same generation continues to search for ways to save a buck in the hopes of protecting themselves from student debt-fueled financial ruin, boob lights are a sensible, economical lighting option.

There’s no arguing they get the job done, either. One flick of a light switch and a whole room is illuminated with a single boob. And yes, despite their suggestive shape, they’re not ideal for mood lighting. But I say adding ambiance is what table lamps are for. Boob lights serve one purpose: To conveniently cast light on the entirety of a space.

The ever-familiar boob light, you see, is actually a very good lamp. As we march ahead in uncertain times, those old dependable boobs will keep lighting the way.