What It Means When You See A Home With A Yellow Porch Light

Have you ever noticed how some households change out their porch light bulbs seasonally? Red and green at Christmas time might be expected, but other colors are used throughout the year to not only celebrate holidays but welcome guests. Take yellow bulbs, for instance. Since yellow is viewed as an inviting color, it conveys a comfy vibe. Thus, some people use these warm-colored porch lights to let guests know they're welcome to stop in for a visit. Yellow light bulbs — or LED party bulbs that can be changed from color to color, including yellow — can also coordinate porch décor with a theme for a gathering, whether you're featuring bumble bees, lemons, or sunflowers in your welcoming front door wreath.

Going beyond the social aspect, yellow porch lights can also signal awareness for causes or send messages of comfort and hope, especially when it comes to mental health. Even more frequently, they're used for the practical purpose of keeping bugs away from entryways.

Many homeowners use colored light bulbs on their front porches to highlight causes important to them — pink for breast cancer awareness, blue in support of autism mindfulness, or purple to encourage domestic violence prevention, for example. Using different porch light colors can signal an openness to conversations and sharing information about these important topics with neighbors and other passersby. In the same vein of fostering awareness, homeowners sometimes place yellow light bulbs in their porch fixtures to express a concern for the trials associated with mental illness, as per Storables. Even more specifically, yellow lights are used to represent suicide prevention mindfulness. 

The use of yellow lights for this purpose makes a particularly poignant statement since yellow is a color associated with inducing feelings of happiness and reducing anxiousness. So, it can be a welcoming color for visitors, even when they're approaching a household to discuss a serious topic like mental health awareness. Aside from welcoming guests and mental health topics, yellow porch lights have another practical purpose.

Another common use for yellow bulbs is to prevent a real nuisance: bugs swarming around a porch light. This is especially true during warmer months and into the fall, when sitting out on the porch in the evening can be a relaxing pastime.

That said, many homeowners find replacing a white porch light with a yellow one solves the problem of teeming insects inadvertently entering a house every time a door is opened or closed. But how does that work? Well, most insects aren't attracted to the wavelengths produced by yellow incandescent or LED lights, according to the experts at Mississippi State University Extension. In fact, yellow bulbs marketed specifically as bug lights have been available in grocery and hardware stores for some time, like Bug Light Bulbs Outdoors, which come in a pack of two and seem to deter most types of insects seeing as 74% of reviewers gave it five stars. So, while a yellow porch light can indeed convey a deeper meaning, it can also simply serve the useful purpose of keeping bugs at bay.