Three months and two rings in, I’m finally ready to give this thing a full review.
Review #9 - Oura Ring 💍
What Is It
Oura makes, in their words, “the most innovative, stylish wearable on the market.” The Oura Ring is a “smart ring” that tracks over 20 biometric signals to give you personalized health insights accessible via a $6/mo membership to their app.
Their hero and only product is the ring, which comes in two models, Heritage (Gen 2) and Horizon (Gen 3). They share the same technical capabilities, so the only difference is in their physical design, and therefore the price. I have the Horizon model in Gold — the most expensive option — because I have a penchant for the finer things, naturally.
Brand / Aesthetic
Aesthetic is Oura’s whole thing. It’s the reason that creative directors and influencers and ahead-of-the-trend people are *finally* tracking their fitness years after Apple Watch invented the arguably life-changing category. First and foremost, it presents as an actual piece of jewelry, an accessory that can stand alone without its technical capabilities.
We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming with a message from the author:
I’ve never been one for quantifying my health, aside from the obligatory blood tests at the doctors office; I have the self-awareness to know that TMI about my body wouldn’t bode well for my slightly obsessive personality. As a longtime wellness enthusiast, a wearable fitness tracker was ostensibly the next step in my “wellness journey” (another phrase I’ll never say earnestly) to my friends and family. I’ve been asked the question “why don’t you have an Apple Watch?” multiple times. So much so, actually, that I had my response nailed down and ready to retort: “Two reasons. It’s ugly and I don’t care to know those numbers.”
I still don’t care to know how many calories I burn in a day (does anyone need to know this?) or how many steps I took (I live in New York, trust). So why did I ask for this $535 ring as a birthday present this past year? Good question, and again, two reasons. It’s pretty and I’m curious.
Not only is the ring itself sophisticated and stylish, the brand keeps it chic too. Well, sort of. There’s a lot to dig into here, so I’m dividing this section into two smaller chunks: website and app.
Website
If you’re looking at the website alone, you can tell they’ve got the fundamentals down. The color palette, the imagery, and the text treatment do a pretty good job of conveying the aspirational-meets-clinical feel I assume they’re going for. Most of the copy is above average too — I find their matter-of-factness to be empathetic and empowering (cornball alert).
But they’re losing me with phrases like this:
There’s a fine line between wearing health trackers and living in a surveillance state, and they cross it real quick with that one. Oura for Business, described below, is equally freaky.
I’m going to just pretend I don’t know about this whole thing. Anyways…
App
This is where they really fall off. The app is an integral part of the experience, given it’s where the majority of their customer interaction lives, but it’s truly just subpar.
*You are about to be VERY privileged to see my personal health information, so seriously, don’t comment on my resting heart rate. I don’t want to talk about it.*
There’s too much shit to look at and I don’t know where to direct my eyeballs. Clearly I’m not well-rested, so I’ll leave it there.
Marketing
They say that a well-designed product speaks for itself. This, their celebrity clientele, and the prohibitively high price point has to explain why Oura continues to be an aspirational brand even though they post an inconsistent array of decent informational graphics, un-engaging lifestyle photography, and dumb memes like this on their social.
Sorry, that was harsh, but the energy is millennial cringe (FKA cheugy; it’s apparently now cheugy to say cheugy). Their social strategy is pretty reliant on “funny” content (funny to who, is the question) which makes little to no sense for a brand that partnered with Equinox — a notoriously self-serious brand — to make a signature ring for rich, fit people (who I doubt are enthused by the Instagram equivalent of a Buzzfeed quiz).
On that note, partnerships are Oura’s big marketing win. Between collaborations with Strava, Natural Cycles, Open, and Gucci (?!?), they’re increasing product functionality to their continuously-paying (ha, ha…) members while adding points to their cool score.
I don’t even use the Oura x Natural Cycles cross-functionality, but it did somehow make the brand as a whole more appealing to me? Maybe it just hit me in the My Body My Choice bone that’s a customary part of the liberal white woman anatomy.
Efficacy
I’ll spare you from the nitty gritty details of Oura’s technology — mainly because I don’t fully understand it — but let’s just say, it’s no joke. To give you what the NY Times calls “highly-accurate” data about your sleep, activity, and “readiness”, the ring uses infrared photoplethysmography sensors (PPG) for heart rate and respiration, negative temperature coefficient (NTC) sensor for body temperature, and a 3D accelerometer for movement. A whole mouthful.
What it does well:
Sleep Data. This is Oura’s pièce de résistance and for good reason. The ring monitors how my heart rate and temperature changes throughout the night to tell me how restful, efficient and consistent my sleep is. This inevitably causes a virtual scolding on the weekends when I don’t wake up at my usual 6:33am alarm.
Comparison over time. Because it keeps track of all my data points each day, it’s fun to see how certain weeks that were more stressful than others impacted certain markers in my day (how many steps I got in, how balanced my heart rate was, etc).
What it does not-so-well:
Activity reporting. The Oura ring is supposed to pick up on the type of activity I’m doing based on my movement, which could be cool in theory. But one time it asked me if I was horseback riding when I was walking down the West Side Highway. Not sure if that’s offensive or…
Customer service. I had to exchange my ring for a larger size because I was getting a gnarly rash from it. I know, cute! The only way to reach their CX team is via email, and there’s a high probability you’ll get ghosted more than once before the issue is resolved. For a $500+ product, I’d expect a little more.
Market their mental wellness offerings. Apparently I have headspace meditations on here with my membership? Who knew?
What makes me feel weird:
Readiness. This is pretty much the combination of my sleep information and the previous day’s activity synthesized to let me know how my day is going to go. Sometimes it tells me that I’m very un-ready for the day, which has the potential to be a scary self-fulfilling prophecy.
Overall Thoughts
So, should you buy this thing? Ehhh.
If you’re really into bio-hacking, working through a health condition, or obsessed with data (are you okay, btw), I think you’ll have a lot of fun with it. If you’re in the market for a piece of high quality, waterproof jewelry, and the functional part of it is an added bonus, I also would endorse the purchase. This isn’t a helpful yes/no answer, so if you’re still thinking about it, shoot me an email and I’ll consult on a case by case basis.
Ultimately, my gripes with the Oura ring are less about Oura specifically and more about wearables as a larger category. Perhaps I’m a highly sensitive person (forgive the phrase), but I don’t think this device, or any other for that matter, is telling me something I don’t already know about myself. I know when I slept poorly and I also know that the dairy-free ice cream I ate right before bed was the cause. I don’t really see the need to quantify these experiences when we could just listen to our bodies and feel the feelings. Namaste, I guess.
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️/5
In Other News…
Last thing on health data: Function Health is partnering with Equinox to create personalized training sessions based on your biological profile. Are we into this?
Vacation launched 3 new facial SPFs, including bronzing drops that look like they’ll give Tan Luxe a run for their money.
Flip, the insane TikTok Shop Dupe where I got the $125 Goop Glow serum for $5, just raised $144 million in their Series C
Fun new vertical coming soon, so stay tuned. As always, if there’s a product you want reviewed or just want to chat, reply to this email. :)
Thanks for sharing! I've tried my sister's Apple watch as well as my uncle's Garmin to mainly track my running metrics but I ended up hating how it looked and feeling surveyed... I am curious how I would feel about the Oura ring, but probably mostly the same except for not having to carry around a huge black clunk on my arm.
Welp, glad to not have to buy that. I had a Whoop for a year, possibly the ugliest tracker you could get, and those stats also often didn't fit my own judgement of how I felt. Ditched it and behaving exactly as before, but now with ~elegant~ wrists