Why Night Shift isn't enough
for migraines

What Night Shift actually does

Night Shift adjusts your display's color temperature on a schedule, shifting from cooler (bluer) during the day to warmer (more orange) at night. Apple designed it to reduce blue light exposure before bed, which can help with circadian rhythm and sleep quality.

What Night Shift does not do: filter specific wavelengths, target the 480nm melanopsin peak, emulate clinical tint profiles like FL-41, or provide any metric for how much migraine-triggering light it removes. It has one slider — warmer to cooler — and no concept of spectral filtering.

Side-by-side comparison

Night Shift is still useful

Night Shift does what it was designed to do: it warms your screen in the evening to support healthy sleep. If you don't have migraines or light sensitivity, Night Shift may be all you need.

Many migraine sufferers use both. Night Shift runs on a schedule for general evening comfort. Nox activates on demand when you need migraine-level protection. They complement each other — Night Shift handles the background circadian adjustment, while Nox provides targeted relief when photophobia strikes.

The science Night Shift doesn't address

Migraine photophobia is driven by intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs) expressing melanopsin, which peaks at 480nm. Research by Noseda et al. (2016) at Harvard showed these cells are hyperactive in migraine sufferers, and that only narrow-band green light at 530nm doesn't worsen headache pain.

A simple warm tint doesn't address this. It reduces some 480nm light incidentally, but it also removes beneficial wavelengths and leaves much of the melanopsin-activating range untouched. Clinical FL-41 tinted lenses, which selectively target the blue-green range, reduced migraine frequency by 74% in trials. That level of precision requires spectral filtering, not color temperature shifting. Read the full research.