Hey BBC, there is no such thing as “bisexual lighting”! — a viral marketing case study
Bisexual lighting is the simultaneous use of pink, purple, and blue lighting to represent bisexual characters. It has been used in nightclubs as well as supposedly in studio lighting for film and television.
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Amelia Perrin has criticized the trend of using such lighting when bisexual characters appear in television and music videos, arguing in Cosmopolitan that this visual image “perpetuates bisexual stereotypes”. Perrin argues that this kind of lighting is usually produced by neon lights, which suggest “clubs and dancefloors” to the viewer, and this implies that “bisexual hook-ups and relationships are merely ‘experiments’, and something that only happens when you’re drunk on a night out.”[1]
Lara Thompson, a lecturer of film at Middlesex University, has argued that bisexual lighting is not well-known, stating: “I would have to see more examples before I see bisexual lighting as a wholly convincing phenomenon”
If you watch or follow content creators on Youtube of any size, you must have noticed that kind of lighting that Youtubers increasingly use to give her videos that characteristic colourful “disco” look. It’s a look that is also associated with the Outrun music genre. Those of us who were kids in the 1980s remember the artists who defined the feel of that sound, and back then it was all men. It was music that girls liked, yes, but it was also very gay music. Many people in the social media wonder about the origins of this funky lighting system that everyone thinks is so cool & hip. BBC referred to it as bisexual lighting, but I discovered that there is different story behind the popularity of these kinds of lights in Youtube videos. During my research I discovered a lighting package called the Philips Hue LightStrip. Famous techie YTers were already doing demo videos with those Philips lights in 2013, years before CP began making videos. Philips had shipped out packages of the strip to these techie Youtubbers to help promote this new product.
These LightStri phave been featured in Youtube videos since at least 2013, according to this video which was the oldest one I could find:
The use of this lighting strip system really took off around 2016. I don’t know if this was due to Philips contacted a number of techie Youtubbers and passed them along free kits to try out for their followers, but the use of such lights on Youtube has been steadily spreading since then. Here’s a video of a techie Youtubber trying out the strip of their followers in 2016:
And here is another demonstration video by a techie Youtuber, also from 2016:
And here is a video by a female techie Youtuber explaining and demonstrating her use of these colourful lights:
Eventually if one were to do search on Youtube using the search term “the house tour video”, a popular genre of video in its own right on Youtube, one would find one video after another of content creators showing off their implementation of these lights in their own houses.
It would be nice if people could finally please stop pretending there is anything original about LightStrip strips. Youtubers were already doing demo videos with LightStrip in 2013, years before some BBC journalist noticed them and decided to invent some term. Like I said, I do not know if or how many content creators received a kit from Philips, but I would not be surprised if that were the case. It’s still interesting though how what to me looks like a clever viral marketing campaign came to be associated with bisexuality.
