Philips 40W Equivalent Warm Glow Candelabra LED review: Dial down the brightness, and the color temperature with it

With a lot of incandescent light bulbs, you'll notice a distinctively warm and "orangey" tone as you dim things down low. That's the effect that Philips is trying to capture with its "Warm Glow" line of LED light bulbs, including this $9 candelabra bulb. Dim the light down, and the color temperature will drop deep into the orange end of the spectrum, giving you a similar sort of candle-like glow.

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Philips 40W Equivalent Warm Glow Candelabra LED

The Good

This Philips candelabra LED mimics an incandescent by dropping the color temperature as you dim the light down. We were able to dim the bulb cleanly down to zero on every dimmer switch we tested -- no other candelabra LED can say that.

The Bad

The bulb flickered a bit on our dimmer switches, undercutting its main selling point. Its performance was also affected by heat buildup more than any other bulb we tested.

The Bottom Line

The unique "Warm Glow" approach to dimming isn't enough to justify switching over to this otherwise mediocre candelabra bulb.

That's a neat trick that you won't get with other candelabra LEDs in the lighting aisle, but I'm not sure that it's enough to justify buying in. Simply put, the Philips Warm Glow LED didn't perform well in our tests -- namely our heat test, where it finished dead last out of eleven bulbs. On top of that, it isn't quite as bright as the majority of your other options, and it isn't rated to last as long, either, with a promise of 15,000 hours as opposed to the more common 25,000 hours.

Above all, the price of this LED is still off-putting. $9 is a high ask, especially considering that you'll likely need to buy several of them. Unfortunately, that's largely true of the category of the whole. Your cheapest option is the standard Philips candelabra LED, which sells in a $10 three-pack at Home Depot. That bulb isn't dimmable, though, and the cheapest dimmable options only cost about $2 less than the Warm Glow LED.

The Warm Glow candelabra LED is a nice-looking bulb that puts out a measured 320 lumens of brightness from a power draw of 4.5 watts, giving it a good-not-great efficiency rating of 71.1 lumens per watt. It glows at a golden color temperature just over 2,500 K -- dim it down, and that color temperature will fall well below 2,000 K, as promised. The crown-like diffuser at the center of the bulb will also add a crystal-like texture to the light -- whether or not that's something you want from your chandelier is up to you.

Among incandescent lookalikes, the Warm Glow LED's closest competitor would be the vintage-style candelabra LED from Feit Electric, which also costs about $9. That bulb arranges its light-emitting diodes to resemble an incandescent filament, and uses yellow-tinted glass to glow at an ultra-low, orange color temperature just over 2,000 K.

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Of the two, I think that the Philips bulb is the better pick. Though both bulbs did at well at casting an even spread of light in all directions, the Philips bulb did slightly better than Feit did. It's also noticeably brighter and better at dimming, too, with less flicker than we saw from Feit. It also dimmed cleanly down to zero on each switch, which is a very good result. The vintage-style Feit bulb couldn't get down any lower than 14 percent brightness on any of the switches.

Still, the Philips bulb's slight flicker is enough to undercut the appeal of that Warm Glow approach to dimming, especially at a price of $9 per bulb. It was also the last place finisher in our thermal management tests, which means that it probably isn't the best pick for enclosed fixtures, where heat gets trapped. If that dimmable, incandescent quality of light is what matters most to you, then you're probably better off sticking with actual incandescents or halogens -- at least for the time being.

For more on candelabra LEDs, check out our full category overview.