Let there be light! How a Nordic innovation banishes Helsinki’s winter darkness

From one extreme to another

There’s no doubt about it that Finland needs Salomaa’s expertise. When it comes to light, the country is one of incredible extremes.

Helsinki, for example, bathes in 19 hours of sunshine during the 24 hours of Juhannus, the summer solstice. Journey north of the Arctic Circle to Lapland and you won’t see sunset at all. Winter, on the other hand, changes everything.

Thanks to a combination of cloud and geography, Helsinki can get as little as 12 hours of sunshine during the whole of November. In Lapland, it’s nighttime for 52 days straight. 

Circadian chaos at the top of the world

If you’ve never experienced a sunlit midnight stroll or the winter sky afire with the Northern Lights, you’ll doubtless find these extremes exciting. However, after a while, the light, or lack of it, starts to mess with your circadian rhythm

Otherwise known as the body clock, it tells you when to do things like sleep and eat. When your body clock gets confused, your mood, alertness and well-being are affected too.

This appropriately named condition is called Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD).

According to research, 10–30 % of Finns suffer from some of the SAD symptoms.

These include fatigue, craving for sugar, low self-esteem, irritability and social withdrawal. You’ll start to feel like this in October, and get worse from November to January. It’s only when the sun makes a welcome reappearance, around February and March, that you’ll bounce back.

Find your rhythm

Happily, after thousands of years struggling with changing light patterns, Finns have also found unique solutions to overcome their effects. One of the most magical is Big Sky, the innovation from Sami Salomaa’s company Light Cognitive.

This huge light wall greets visitors as they enter St. George Care, the spa and well-being haven of Hotel St. George in Helsinki. Based on research on how light changes from day to night, Big Sky emulates natural light and promotes a healthy, regular sleep-wake cycle throughout the year.

While working with LED lights for plants, Salomaa had an epiphany that’s now helping ever more people to survive the long dark.

-We were creating lots of products for plants, which made them flourish and grow faster with different kinds of light. It suddenly crossed my mind… why can’t we do this for human beings? he says.