Why most artificial fire looks wrong, and what fixes it

The failure of a cheap flame effect is not brightness or colour. It is period. The modulation runs on a short repeating cycle, and the eye — which is extraordinarily good at this — locks onto the repeat and stops believing.

The correction is to sum frequencies that share no common multiple. Do that and the waveform never repeats; there is no loop to catch, however long you sit with it.

The second correction is speed. Real flame at a distance moves slowly; it is only close up that it flickers fast. Anything meant to be seen across a room should modulate slowly, and most do the opposite because fast reads as more dramatic in a two-second product video.

The third is colour temperature. 2200 K is candlelight. 2700 K, which is what most warm bulbs use, is already a tungsten filament, and the eye knows the difference even when the mind does not.