When you hold the shade, you will probably say to yourself, does this thing bend? Yes, it does. It's a very high quality light shade, created to diffuse light. It will seemingly appear to "break" if you want to bend it even just a little bit (because of the stiffness of the material), however it's designed to be flexible. My suggestion is to have it in a warm area (room temperature would be fine), and let it sit for around an hour, and then bend the shade according to the instructions. If you receive the package during the winter, the plastic will be cold, so letting it sit out of the box at room temperature for around an hour is a good idea anyway.

The following image below was taken looking down into the Ego shade (birds-eye view). As you can see, the shade does bend, and you might want to use this as a guide to how much. The following three images also display the steps involved when installing the socket housing and the lamps.

Looking down inside the shade panel, you can also see the two attachments which use the flourescent lamps. When putting together the Ego system, you will be placing this shade over the lamp socket housing.

This is what the Ego looks like after you attach the housing unit to the shade itself.

In the above image, you can see how the two lamps are positioned within the shade panel. The two white caps which keep the lamp socket flaps in place, can be seen in the center of the image as well. I would also like to mention how clean and white the entire inside of the panel is. This assures you will get virtually no unwanted non-white light coming out of the diffuser panel.

The Flourescent Lamp

The packaging of the flourescent lights is superb. In fact, pending your delivery truck's tires running over your precious package, the lamps should be in perfect condition. However, once you remove them from their protective packaging, and begin to screw them into the lamp socket housing, a word of advice and caution.

It is VERY easy to want to screw the lamps in by grasping the flourescent tube. Please don't. Lowel mentions this in their assembly instructions, but I'd like to echo this caution more directly. When screwing in the lights to the lamp housing unit, it will be a natural tendency to screw the lamp on by the bulb itself, because 1) it's closest to your hands, and 2) the shaft of the lamp is much smaller in diameter than the bulb.

The Lamp Socket Housing

The socket housing for the two lamps is of high-quality construction. Being the person I am, I picked it up and just held it for a moment. It felt solid and well-built. While other manufacturers could have opted for a plastic housing, Lowel did not. This is a solid base which guarantees your Ego will stay where you leave it.