My gosh, I don't think I've seen a single completely accurate statement on white LED's yet.

There are different ways to make a white LED. But the latest involve using a *blue* or near-UV (not IR!) LED to stimulate a phosphor or phosphor-like compound; or by using a combination of blue and yellow to produce something close to white.

And "color temperature" is only part of the story. A non-incandescent source can look similar to an incandescent source of a particular color temperature but something called the "Color Rendering Index" is a crucial spec for LED's, fluorescents, other gas-discharge lights, or anything with a spiky spectrum. The CRI describes how well a given light source can reproduce colors. An artificial light source (incandescent is the reference and considered "natural") with a higher CRI will do a better job of making your food, scrapbooking, whatever, look natural. But incandescent will always be best. And, as I read about CRI on wikipedia, I discovered the the CRI is only based on 8 color samples, which hardly spans the full complement of colors in the world. So perhaps it's possible to design an artificial light source with an artificially high CRI -- i.e. close to 100 but some real-world colors still look funky. (Though I honestly haven't done my homework to assess whether they're sufficiently representative or not.)