I tried the TikTok-viral ‘Alix Earle phone light.’ Does it live up to the hype?

Previously few months, Alix Earle has taken TikTok by storm. The influencer is understood for “prepare with me” movies, doing her make-up as she talks about her life to her 4.9 million followers — which, admittedly, I’m one in all. And like lots of her followers, I questioned how her pores and skin at all times managed to look flawless regardless of her recounts of a wild night time prior and surrounding dim lighting. 

Whereas the influencer is open about utilizing TikTok’s magnificence filter, she admitted her secret to glowing, top-tier movies is definitely the $36 Newmowa 60 LED clip-on telephone gentle. Unsurprisingly, the sunshine, now generally known as the “Alix Earle gentle,” has been bought out for months. Final week, nevertheless,  I used to be lastly in a position to get my fingers on it to see if it is actually well worth the hype. 

I’ve to say, regardless of the hundreds of thousands of TikTok critiques of customers praising the sunshine, I nonetheless had low expectations. These had been rapidly lifted, together with the standard of my images. The clip-on gentle, which simply attaches to your telephone or laptop computer, has three totally different gentle energy settings: a white/blue gentle, a hotter yellow, and a mixture of the 2. 

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All three add dimension to my images, giving the looks of glowing pores and skin, however with out trying unnatural. All the things merely seems enhanced. There’s additionally an choice to amp up or simmer down the brightness on every respective setting. I personally like the combo of softer and sharper lighting because it takes away the cloudiness of the uncooked smartphone photograph, changing it with a clearer picture with extra “pop” — even in less-than-ideal workplace lighting. I used this setting when FaceTiming my household and have by no means acquired so many compliments on my video-camera look. 

At solely 4.76 x 1.85 inches and 6.7 ounces, the sunshine is sensible to take with you — which is smart given Earle’s on-the-go life-style. I simply carried the sunshine round New York Metropolis with me in a standard-sized purse, prepared to show the cityscape right into a photoshoot alternative, whatever the embarrassed look on my roommate’s face. I additionally like you can simply regulate the sunshine to 90 levels, getting no matter angle most accurately fits you or the encircling setting. To make it much more handy, the sunshine is rechargeable through a USB micro port, coming with the appropriate cable. 

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Primarily, this gentle is making it means too straightforward for me to take flattering images and subsequently strive my hand at blowing up on TikTok. However till then, I will let the Alix Earles of the world rule the app and use the accent to gentle up my digital camera roll or Zoom name high quality. All this to say, this gentle is, in actual fact, well worth the hype — for content material creators and the common smartphone photographer or video conferencer alike.