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Evening Standard
Evening Standard
Lifestyle
William Hosie

All I want this Christmas is an Oura Ring: by next December it could all be over

One ring to rule them all? - (moviestillsdb.com)

“What I hate in fashion,” the newly single Kate Moss said on Bella Freud's podcast, Fashion Neurosis, “is when everybody feels they need to make the same bag, or the same dress.”

Look around, and you may notice a similar bout of mimesis has afflicted the hands of the rich and famous: specifically, a conspicuous ring in plated or matte finish, worn on the index or annular. It is not by Loewe or Chanel but by Oura, a sleep-tech company headquartered in Finland. Since no trend has been more ascendant in the past few years than wellness, it was only a matter of time before the jewellery department, too, came under its thumb.

It would be very unlike Kate Moss to hop on any trend too late in the day – but you would be lucky to. The latest model, Oura Ring 4, costs at least £349 with an additional subscription of £70 per annum – a generous Christmas present for any wishing to join the fitness tracking health club. Of the many celebrities and media pundits sporting the status symbol du jour, among the highest profile are Kim Kardashian, Prince Harry, Gwyneth Paltrow and Antony Scaramucci.

(ES Comp)

Oura has been around since 2013; last month, its market value reached $5bn, double what it was in 2022. During this period, the brand even released a capsule collection with Gucci. But could its day in the sun be up?

The Oura ring tracks your heart rate variability: from there, it’s able to assess a whole host of data: sleep quality, body temperature, activity, what it calls “readiness” – i.e. how prepared your body is for exercise or sleep when the time comes to do either.

The main benefit of Oura over rival products is sartorial

Rival products include the Whoop wristband (revenue estimated at $167.2M per year), the Fitbit (produced by Google) and the Apple Watch (which we'll come back to later). Caring about one’s health is, as they say, very now: but is it possible to care about one’s health too much? The answer is: yes, and the backlash against obsessive, endless health tracking is beginning to build with aplomb.

The main benefit of Oura over rival products is sartorial: it’s something elegant that you wouldn’t even notice was there and especially helpful when you want to wear it to sleep. “I’m mad for the Oura,” says The Standard’s Beauty Editor, Madeleine Spencer. “It fits it seamlessly with my other jewellery”.

I find interesting, though, what the melding of fashion and wellness says about the traditional signifiers of glamour and taste (diamonds, cigarettes, nonchalance) – supplanted, as they were, by their polar opposite (a non-allergenic titanium ring that tells you exactly how you’re doing and nags you for not caring). Even Kate Moss, once so nonchalant she was photographed doing what was allegedly cocaine in Nelson Mandela’s house, now has a wellness empire of her own.

Every fad’s vices get the better of it

And yet, this could well be the last Christmas where an Oura ring, or indeed any fitness tracker is deemed a fashionable gift. Eventually, every fad’s vices get the better of it – in wellness's case, what started out as a paean to self-care and self-improvement is now a cult of perfectionism so intense that “looking after oneself” has become a competitive sport. Already, the tide is turning. At Apple, things are slowing down: the company sold over 38 million smartwatches in 2023, down from almost 54 million Apple Watch unit sales recorded in 2022 and after it outsold the entire Swiss watch industry in 2020.

Fashion travels in 20-year cycles: wellness (read: the West’s woo-woo version of health) first appeared in the late Sixties, returned in the early Nineties thanks to figures like Deepak Chopra and again at the end last decade, when the mental health crisis and Covid pushed wellness forward as a possible solution. What we’re witnessing at present – the commodification of the movement at the hands of celebrities, rings that track your biomarkers and executive yoga retreats – feels like the tipping point before nonchalance returns, guns blazing. How the likes of Oura, Whoop and Apple pivot their strategies next year – and which of them succeeds – will form an interesting case study for where wellness goes next. Watch that space.

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