The Govee Uplighter Floor Lamp—which is in fact more of a downlighter with an upward-facing ripple effect light—is a gorgeous bit of home decor. Sadly, the Matter functionality is lacking, but that can always be improved.
Govee Uplighter Floor Lamp
A circadian rhythm-aware floor lamp with three stacked lighting zones for ambient, decorative, and task lighting in one sleek unit.
Measuring just over five feet from the floor to the underside of the ring light, the Govee Uplighter Floor Lamp (list price $180, but currently $143 during Prime sales) consists of a white ring downlighter that’s about ten inches across, and a smaller five-inch ripple effect projector on the top of the gray dome. Also on the side is an ambient color ring that’s separately controllable or integrated with the scene. The head can be angled in any direction, but only to about thirty degrees.
The uplighter: ripple effect
The uplighter part projects a wide-area ripple effect, but it’s limited to red, green, and blue. It’s a mechanically produced effect; there’s a fixed wave prism piece of plastic on top, and underneath that, the high-brightness RGB LED fixtures rotate around. You can vary the speed down to zero movement if you want, but you can’t disable the ripple effect entirely and just use it as a color wash uplighter. Because of that fixed prism, the ripple is always present.
What’s more, color selection works in a weirdly limited way. You can choose any color in the app, but it gets split into its component parts: red, green, and blue. In other words, there are distinct red, green, and blue LEDs inside this lamp, not an array of color-mixed RGB LEDs. So if you choose something closer to pure red, you’ll just get red in the effect.
If you pick purple or pink, the ripple becomes red plus blue, so you only get hints of your chosen color in the intersection of the ripple lines. Yellow ends up as red and green. Shades near the center of the color mixer, heading towards white, will mix in all three channels. It’s a clever bit of tech, but it means you’re working with a limited set of colors, and you can’t—for instance—make a nice fire effect of orange and red, because you can’t pick multiple colors. One single color gets split, and no single color splits into red and orange.
That limitation applies to scene selection in the app, too. Scenes can’t override the color-splitting effect. I know the Forest scene is usually yellow and green, but when applied to this light, you just get green and red-green (because that’s how RGB mixing achieves yellow). The same scene feels very different from how it behaves on other Govee lights.
Even stranger, it seems like there’s a white and warm white LED up top too, but I've been unable to mix it with another color. Certain scenes like Waterfall appear to use white plus blue. However, if you manually select the color temperature on the uplighter, you get a single, flat tone. There’s nowhere near as much customization as I’d like, and even in DIY mode, it doesn’t expose all the features that the scenes utilize.
The side light: just color
The side lighting isn't obvious; if you’re sitting down, you can’t see it at all because the dome shape on the top hides it. But there is actually a separate color side-lighting profile around the edge. In most scenes, it just shows the original color that’s being split for the ripple effect, but you can manually set that too. It’s an entirely separate lighting element. That said, it’s not very impactful. If your head isn't above 5 feet or the light is angled away from you, you won’t even see it. It doesn’t project much light outwards; it just glows faintly.
It adds something to the design, though, and would be missed if it wasn't there.
The downlight: it's white
Further to that, you’ve got the regular downlighter function from the ring underneath. This isn’t color; it’s cold to warm white, and it can get really bright—much brighter than the uplighter. There's not a lot to say about it, really. It’s a nice uniform white function, and very functional.
There are two buttons on the actual stem of the device: power, and scene change. You can hold down the scene button to swap between the uplighter and downlighter modes, but you can’t have both on at the same time.
Matter support (or lack thereof)
The Govee Uplighter does technically support Matter, but in a very strange way. You can only control the white downlighter—even when you select a color—though the behavior is decidedly buggy. At one point, I did manage to control the colors, though when I tried to record it, it reverted to white only again. I thought perhaps whichever mode was set last would be the one Matter controlled, but further testing revealed that wasn't the case.
I was expecting it to behave somewhat like the outdoor lamp post, where certain shades of white are directed to the downlight and color selections are directed to the uplighter. Even if you didn’t know which was which, you could experiment and save it to your favorites. But there’s seemingly no way to switch modes through Matter for the uplighter, and any color you choose turns into white.
Should you buy the Govee Uplighter Floor Lamp?
The Govee Uplighter Floor Lamp is a gorgeous, slightly confused piece of home decor. Despite the name, the actual “uplight” is more of a decorative RGB ripple show, while the real brightness comes from the downward-facing white light. The ripple effect is mechanically generated and undeniably cool—but also frustratingly limited. It splits your chosen color into raw RGB ingredients, whether you want it to or not. Fancy a nice warm orange? Too bad: have some red and green instead.
On the smart side, Matter support feels half-baked. Only the downlighter white mode is exposed, and you can’t toggle between them via Matter.
So, if you’re looking for a fully featured smart lamp with proper Matter support and rich color customization—this isn’t it. But if you’re decorating a modern space and want something that looks high-tech, with a trippy ripple effect and stylish design, then it’s a solid choice. It'll go right next to your Matter-compatible lava lamp desktop speaker thing.
