Why Does Every Luxury Hotel Bathroom Think You’re A Bat?

Somehow you can still fork over $1000/night for a luxury hotel room and find yourself squinting into a bathroom mirror so dimly lit, you feel like a detective in an episode of CSI: Beige Marble

We have sent women into space, in form-fitting neoprene jumpsuits, with perfect Dyson-wrap wavy hair and makeup and enough highlighter that would make the Sun envious. We have toilets that play music and analyze your ‘outgoings’. People can now create entire specialty-topic multilingual YouTube Channels in 24 hours, with just four (flattering) pictures of themselves and an AI platform that animates them speaking in tongues (various) and another that writes all their scripts (not that anybody’s necessarily watching), but…

…somehow you can still fork over $1000/night for a luxury hotel room (don’t judge me, everything else was booked, or suspect, or just even too depressing for my most stoic self) and find yourself squinting into a mirror in a bathroom so dimly lit, you feel like a detective in an episode of of CSI: Beige Marble.

Of course there’s always a gleaming stone countertop. A bar of fig soap from, say, Dyptique or Byredo. A swoopy faucet, and a ridiculously tall stack of fluffy white towels. But when it comes to applying your eyeliner in the morning, you are basically left to channel Springsteen, and just go Dancing in the Dark.

Now, there’s a turning point in every woman’s life when good lighting becomes a non-negotiable. Not a luxury or a bonus, but a bare-minimum requirement for happiness. Kind of like indoor plumbing, and Wifi that doesn’t require you call the front desk at 10pm to summon ‘maintenance’ to figure out why your laptop isn’t connecting when you urgently need to stream Season 4 of The Bear.

And yet, in too many groovy hotels that flex rainfall shower heads, beds with 19 decorative pillows, and minibars with artisanal pickle chips, the bathroom lighting is still so subdued it would be better suited to holding a seance. Or a hostage video. In fact, you do you in that bathroom, because you certainly will not want to be tweezing your eyebrows there.

It’s weird, no? The concept of providing both proper bathroom lighting and a magnifying mirror is treated like nuclear fusion: possible (commercially) but probably not in our lifetime. That would require a situational empathy unheard of when private equity investment meets trendy architect meets Estelle Manor (names have not been changed to protect those involved). And by the way, where the hell is the hairdryer?

Here’s a radical idea: if a woman (or anybody, really) is paying quadruple digits for a hotel room, she deserves to be able to see her own face. All of it. Close up. In lighting that doesn’t make her look like she’s trying to star in some kind of moody 1990s Prada ad.

Decent hotels of the world, hear our cry. Or at least, let there be light. The right kind.

Who’s with me? (Say so below, I’ll forward it as a petition if we get enough names)

p.s. If you agree that hotel bathroom lighting is a problem, you’ll of course align that stepping into most retail store changing rooms is a whole different kind of hell. More on that later…