CRI ≥90 LED lighting

Colour rendering decides whether your merchandise looks like itself or looks flat. The same fabric, the same dish, the same paint — under poor rendering it goes dull and loses depth; under high rendering it looks the way it does in daylight. Skin tones follow the same rule: poor light makes faces look grey and tired.

Below CRI 70 belongs in storage and plant rooms where nobody judges colour. CRI 80 and above works for most offices and homes. CRI 90 and above is close to mandatory in showrooms, fashion, cosmetics, food retail, galleries and paint-mixing areas — places where customers decide based on exactly the colour they are looking at.

There is a trade-off few people budget for: at the same wattage, higher-rendering fittings usually deliver slightly fewer lumens. So after raising CRI you have to recalculate fixture quantity to keep the light level, rather than swapping one for one — otherwise the shop shows true colour but ends up darker than before.