Two lights for the prince of one and a half

Philips Hue is one of the biggest names in smart lighting. The brand sells a huge range of lighting products designed to be used inside your home, including its highly popular smart bulbs, and several that can be used outdoors, too.

Philips Hue recently introduced a new addition to its lineup that’s suitable for both indoor and outdoor use. The Philips Hue Dymera is a wall light that contains two independently controllable white and color lights, allowing you to set both to the same color, or choose different colors for each to produce some impressive lighting effects.

I put the Philips Hue Dymera through its paces to see how easy it is to set up, what features it offers, and to find out how well it integrates into my smart home. Here’s what I found out.

Philips Hue Dymera

The Philips Hue Dymera is a stylish wall light that can be installed indoors or out. Two independently controllable lights can be set to any color you wish, allowing you to create impressive multicolored effects. The light also integrates easily into you smart home provided you own a Hue Bridge.

Pros

• Independently controllable lights
• Stylish design
• Simple smart home integration

Cons

• Not cheap
• Only one available color

Price, specs, and availability

Philips Hue launched the Dymera wall light in February 2024. It’s available from the company’s website for $220. It’s also available on Amazon at the same price.

Design

Classic Hue Style

Philips Hue products tend to have a minimalist modern design and the Dymera is no exception. In essence, it’s just a rectangle you stick to the wall, but the curved edges give it a stylish look that I thought could work both inside and outside my home. It reminds me a little of the Art Deco wall lights you find in old movie theaters. The one downside with the design is that it’s only available in black.

There are two lights hidden away at the top and bottom that shine directly up and down from the Dymera. This illuminates the areas above and below the light, leaving darker patches to the left and right, creating a striking appearance.

Installation

Take care when wiring

The Philips Hue Dymera can be installed indoors or out, but in both cases, it needs to be hardwired. There’s no battery option, and no power cable; you need to wire your power directly to the backplate.

This may have just been an error in my particular model, but be sure to follow the instruction booklet to wire the Dymera correctly. I’ve reached out to Signify, the parent company of Philips Hue, for more information.

The instructions themselves are fairly simple to follow despite only having images with no accompanying text. Fit the backplate, connect the wires, screw the front of the light into place, and you’re good to go. You should be aware that there are no fixings included, so you’ll need your own hardware to fix the backplate to the wall.

Once the light is in place and powered on, the lights will come on. You can then search for the new light in the Hue app. You’ll need a Philips Hue Bridge to control the Dymera via the app, and this isn’t included with the product. If you already have other Hue lights, you probably already own one, however.

Performance

A world of color

The Dymera features two separate lights with an output of 1,020 lumens at 4000K. The two lights are independent of each other, so each can be set to its own color and brightness, and you can turn off each light individually, too. You get a whole rainbow of vibrant colors to choose from (16 million of them) and the whites are more than bright enough at standard temperatures of around 2,700K.

What sets the Dymera apart is the two independently controllable lights, which open up a whole world of possibilities when it comes to color combinations. You can create some impressive looks by setting each light to a different color.

Features

Classic Philips Hue ease of use

If you tap the tile in the Hue App, the toggle splits in two, allowing you to toggle the power or set the brightness for the top light and bottom light independently of each other.

The color wheel shows two icons, one for the bottom light and one for the top light. You can move these icons around the color wheel to set a different color for each light or choose a different temperature of white light for each. You can select the ‘Dreamy Dusk’ scene to set the top light to a warm red and the bottom to a husky orange, mimicking the colors of the sunset. Tap the Play icon on a scene, and the lights become dynamic, rotating through the colors that make up that particular scene.

There are also three effects available: Candle, Fireplace, and Prism. Candle makes lights flicker lighter and darker like the flame of a candle. Fireplace does the same, but with deeper oranges, mimicking the light from a burning fireplace. Prism scrolls through the colors of the rainbow. These effects looked fine outdoors, but are probably more suited to an indoor setting.

Smart home integration

HomeKit-compatible

Integrating the Dymera into your smart home is simple to do. In fact, if you’ve already added other Hue lights to your smart home, it may happen automatically. I’d already added Hue lights to the Apple Home app and to Alexa. It showed up automatically in both the Home app and in Alexa, allowing me to control it with my voice.

On Alexa, you can install the Hue app, which allows you to connect Alexa to your Hue Bridge. Any lights you connect to the Hue Bridge in the Hue app will then become discoverable in the Alexa app, allowing you to control them in the app or with your voice using a compatible Alexa device.

You can add the Dymera to your Apple Home app over Matter, as long as you have a device that works as an Apple Home hub, such as the Apple TV 4K or a HomePod. You link your Apple Home app to Hue via the Hue app. Once paired, any lights that you link to your Hue Bridge will appear in the Home app, where you can assign them to different rooms.

Verdict

The Dymera is an interesting product. Philips Hue already offers some stylish outdoor wall lights, but this is the first outdoor that has two independently controllable lights within the same product. It allows you to create some impressive effects, and gives the option to turn one or both lights on, depending on your needs. The design is stylish and looks smart both indoors and outdoors, as long as you’re happy with black.

The product is simple enough to install, provided that you have power in the location where you want to place it. Otherwise, you may need to hire an electrician to ensure you have the right wiring available to connect to your Dymera. Make sure you follow the instructions rather than the labels on the device when wiring it up — as mine were the wrong way round.

Smart home control is excellent, with the light appearing in my smart home apps without me having to do a thing. Despite being possible for many years now, there’s still something magical about being able to control a light with just your voice.

Like all Philips Hue products, it’s not the cheapest option on the market, but as with most of its other smart lighting devices, you’re getting good quality and reliability for your money. If you want to give the outside of your home some highly customizable splashes of color or want to create impressive lighting scenes within your home, then the Philips Hue Dymera can certainly help you do that.