Who Designs Women’s Restrooms?

My recent travels have me pondering the design of women’s restrooms – specifically the lighting.  My vacation from Illinois to California and back lead me through restrooms on airplanes, rest stops, fast food places, theme parks, hotels and a few upscale restaurants.  While cleanliness is usually the first thing we think about when judging a women’s restroom, I’ve been paying more attention to the lighting and now I need to rant about it.

Womens restrooms typically use some type of fluorescent lighting.  This ranges from obnoxiously bright to dull and yellowish at times, depending on wattage and surrounding fixtures.  This causes the typical female complexion to have either a purple tone to it or even a yellow color – ick!  I’m not usually one to make a big deal about how I look, but in one theme park restroom, I did a double-take in the mirror because the lighting made my slight sunburn look like I was morphing into Barney.  Even my kids looked purple – it was that bad!

I’m guessing that fluorescent lights are cheap and that’s why they get installed more often, but what if soft lighting were installed?  In at least two restrooms that I recall, there was a nursing area for mothers in the same open area (which I think is also a bad idea because who wants to nurse a baby next to overflowing public toilets, but that’s another rant).  These nursing areas had softer track lights installed above the couches and chairs.  There were no mirrors in this area, but I could tell a difference in the overall color of that room compared to the adjacent area with the fluorescent lighting. Same flooring, same paint job, but the nursing area looked warmer and more inviting and the women sitting in there did not looked so washed out or Barney-like.

The best restroom I have ever been in by far was in a church where my band was rehearsing.  Not only was it exceptionally clean, but they had installed some lovely fixtures with soft lighting that made me look normal in color.  They had some other niceties in there as well which made it so pleasant, but the lighting was the first thing I noticed.

So why can’t public restrooms make better use of the lighting?  It’s probably cost, but if the businesses would stop to think for a second on how that can make a customer feel more comfortable they might find it’s a worthwhile expense.  Sometimes it’s the little things that make the biggest difference.