What’s a sunrise alarm? Well, you can read my guide to the best sunrise alarms if you want the full explainer, but the gist of it is that a sunrise alarm wakes you up gently in the morning through manipulating a built-in lamp.
Scientifically speaking, we feel best when we wake up to the gradually brightening, intensifying sunlight as it rises and shifts from a mellow orange to an intense blue-white. Not everyone gets up in sync with the rhythms of the natural sunrise, so a sunrise alarm mimics it by creating a gradually shifting, artificial sunrise of light temperature (how blue, yellow, or orange) that matches the real thing.
It’s a wonderful trick, and while the Casper Glow Light wasn’t the most feature-rich sunrise alarm I’ve tested, it was the most intuitive and, dare I say, fun to use. And although it’s a pricey device, it’s currently on a 10% off sale for $116.
you’ll flip out
Most sunrise alarms work by connecting to your smartphone or tablet, through which you use an app to set details such as your wake-up time, the length of the simulated sunrise, and all that. The Casper Glow Light is no different.
Casper takes that to an extreme. If you’ll take a second to look at the Glow Light, you’ll see no buttons at all, no speaker, and no screen. That’s how committed Casper is to the sleekness of its design. No other sunrise alarm—and I’ve tested pretty much all of them that exist—even comes close.
The Casper is just plain fun to use. Not to mention, it’s gorgeous. It has a modernist look to it that doesn’t scream “alarm clock.” To work the most basic functions, you just flip it over to start the sunset program.
You can carry it with you from room to room or place it wherever you like inside your bedroom, as it recharges wirelessly on its charging pad. When it’s on the pad, you just spin it to adjust brightness up or down.
Ah, but wait. Are you bouncing in your seat to correct me because you spied what you think looks like a button? Good catch. You’re absolutely right. I was just testing you. On both concave, scalloped ends of the Glow Light, there’s an enormous, round button.
There’s a sunset function, too, that works like the sunrise function in reverse. It’s for getting you nice and sleepy before bed, taking advantage of that same biological synchronization with the setting of the sun to cue your body to start feeling tired.
Pushing that button is how you pause and restart the sunset countdown, if for whatever reason you need to halt your getting ready for bed.
There are other sunrise alarms with more features, sure. This is the one I had the most fun using, though.
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