I'm Never Taking My Oura Ring Off
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I'm a ring girl. Not the boxing kind, but the jewelry kind. You know how some people can’t leave the house without their wristwatch, or they have an impressive shoe collection, or really, just any signature element that’s part of their look? Well, with me, that's my rings. I own dozens, collected throughout the years, but I have seven in my signature stack that I wear every day. Sometimes, I meet people who ask for a “ring tour”—that is, a brief origin story for each ring. These four are pure silver, I say. These two are white gold, from that little indie jewelry shop that used to be on East 9th Street. And this one is an Oura Ring.
Don’t worry, if you don’t know what an Oura Ring is—you aren’t out of the loop yet, but I’ll fill you in, because you will be soon. Put simply: It’s a ring with sensors on the inside that track your wellness stats (things like calories burned in a day, BPM, body temperature, sleep cycle, and more) and deliver them neatly to an app on your phone. It had all the benefits of Apple Health and a Fitbit in one, with the even greater benefit of being smaller, sleeker, more detailed, and all around cooler. Let me tell you why.
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It’s easy to wear
It’s easy to miss an Oura, worn alone or amongst plentiful other rings; it blends right in, looks like a solid band that comes in silver, gold, black, matte black, or rose gold, so there’s an option for every jewelry preference. Chic. Sleek. Unassuming. I wouldn’t have bought or worn a ring that interfered with my meticulously curated silver stack, and I’ve always steered clear of Apple Watches and Fitbits for their bulky, unstylish looks that sat uncomfortably on my wrist all day. And now that I know what an Oura Ring is and looks like, I see them popping up everywhere—they fit right in with other rings, sure, but are also simple and understated enough to be quietly worn by a man who usually wouldn’t wear any jewelry at all (the matte black option is an especially a good choice for this).
The Oura, despite being equipped with research-grade sensors inside the band, is incredibly lightweight too—perfect for keeping on at all hours, including when you’re sleeping (if I was ever told to wear an Apple Watch to bed, I’d riot). Because the charge holds for a long time—I’m talking, like, up to a week—it’s perfect to slip on once and forget about until the app reminds me to give it a quick charge. You can keep it on in the shower, and even turn it on Airplane Mode to preserve a bluetooth connection to the app if you’re getting on a flight.
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It tracks everything
The Oura Ring took a second for me to grapple with, initially. When you download the app on your phone and start to wear your ring around the clock, you get a health summary neatly delivered to your phone after each sleep—it starts with a home page that shares your heart rate data, inactive time in the day, heart rate, and sleep efficiency, and for women a menstrual cycle prediction. Then there's a readiness page with more details, like your body temperature, respiratory rate, RHR, and a readiness score for the day. One of the most popular features is the sleep page that breaks down your sleeping patterns into total sleep, time in bed, sleep efficiency (including what percentage of your sleep was REM, deep, or light), and a sleep score. And finally, the activity page that shows your calories burned, steps, walking equivalency, and goal progress. So when I say this ring tracks everything, I mean it tracks everything.
I got into the habit of waking up and checking my Oura app like it was social media—how many hours did I sleep last night? Was it a deep enough sleep? Am I ready for the day? As someone who doesn’t sleep well, or often, seeing my low sleep score and a low readiness for the day every day made me feel more aware of how tired I was, at first. It made me think, all day long, about crawling back into bed—and so I did. And I started getting more sleep, and better sleep, and feeling better when I woke up, which is the whole point, I realized. Making me conscious of the wellness areas I was lacking in led me to fix them, and feel better overall. I got Oura’d.
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And it does even more
Before getting the Oura ring, I wasn’t even all that concerned about my health stats (at least, not to the degree of needing daily updates about things like my REM sleep and resting heart rate). I’m still not a fitness fanatic by any means, but you don’t really need to be, to get your money’s worth from the ring; it does a lot more than track your activity. The explore page has become my new BFF, with little audio clips in categories of meditation, breathing, sleeping, and learning. They range from five minutes to 20-plus minutes, so I can listen to a soundscape to access my calm on my walk to the train station, or a story about humankind’s love of the moon as I drift to sleep, Oura Ring on my finger.
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Photography by Philip Friedman. Prop styling by John Olson for Halley Resources.
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