I'm a 'Cosmo' Editor and I Tested the Oura Ring Gen3 for Half a Year—Here's My Unfiltered Review

"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links."

If there’s one thing I can count on, it’s hearing my family talk about their Oura rings whenever I go home. My dad, the #1 Oura ring champion in my life, took things so far as to wear his Oura ring on his fourth finger instead of his literal wedding band, lol. So naturally, when I was offered the chance to test out Oura’s Generation 3 Ring for Cosmo and give my completely unfiltered review of everything I liked, loved, and didn’t quite love, I jumped on it.

Haven’t heard of Oura? The brand makes smart rings that measure biometrics like temperature, heart rate, blood oxygen, sleep, and stress levels directly from your finger. Think of it like a smartwatch, except lighter, stronger, prettier, and much easier to wear discreetly—you’ve probably seen tons of people sporting an Oura ring without even realizing it. Even celebs like Kim Kardashian, Gwenyth Paltrow, and Jennifer Aniston are fans. Basically, the Oura ring is the smartwatch’s cooler, younger sister and she’s about to take over.

After five months of testing the Oura Gen3 Ring, I’ve concluded that if you want to learn more about your health patterns and see if all the health habits you’re blindly implementing are actually working, the Oura is absolutely worth the investment.

Still debating whether the splurge is worth it? Keep scrolling, because I’m about to break down the ordering process, price, and pros and cons for you.

✔️ P.S. This is new, up-to-date info, bb. This article was initially written in November 2023 and was updated again in March 2024 to include information about Oura’s new Pregnancy Insights feature as well as more glowing feedback on all the things I love about the Oura ring after five months of testing, just for you.

Picking out your ring

I knew I wanted to try the newest third generation of the Oura ring, so the first order of business was figuring out what size and color to order. Pro tip: Oura offers free, 3D-printed sizing kits that you can send straight to your front door! You’ll get eight plastic ring sizers, from size 6 to 13, to try on at home.

I typically wear a size 5, but that isn’t offered, so I wore the size 6 tester and it actually ended up being the perfect size to accommodate the slight swelling that happens in the morning. Finally someone put a ring on it! (Me. It was me.) Note that if your ring feels too tight in the morning or too loose at night, you can easily switch it to another finger throughout the day.

Oura recommends putting on the ring and then making a fist—and if you see a little gap between your finger and the ring, to go a size down.

As for colors, the chic ring comes in subtle shades of gold, rose gold, silver, titanium, dark gray, and black—all lovely choices, but I knew I wanted to order it in gold so that my Oura ring would blend seamlessly with my usual gold jewelry stack.

Horizon — Rose

Heritage — Gold

Heritage — Silver

Heritage — Black

Horizon — Brushed Titanium

Horizon — Stealth

How does it work?

"The Oura Ring’s research-grade sensors pack state-of-the-art heart rate, HRV, temperature, activity, and sleep monitoring technology into a discrete, comfortable ring that you’ll forget is there but never want to take off,” explains Jason Russell, Oura’s Senior Director of Product.

The ring itself is a slightly thicker, yet super lightweight, metal band with tiny sensors on the inside that pick up all sorts of health data—it can even track your blood oxygen levels by shining a little red light into your finger and then measuring how much light is reflected back. There's a tiny little divot in the Gen3 ring that should be aligned with the palm side of your finger to track the best results.

Each morning, the Oura app (v easy to set-up, btw) gives you a Sleep Score, an Activity Score, and a Readiness Score on a scale of 0-100 as well as a Resilience level, which basically measures how much stress your body is dealing with and how readily you’re bouncing back from it. I used all of these scores each day to determine whether I was ready to take on an extra-challenging workout or if I should probably squeeze in a nap at some point in the day. And FYI: the extensive data that Oura gives you is pretty easy for a regular person (hello, that’s me, your friendly neighborhood Cosmo editor who knows nothing about STEM) to interpret. Win-win!

Horizon Gold Ring

Horizon Silver Ring

Horizon Silver Ring

Heritage Silver Ring

Heritage Stealth Ring

But, like, how much does the Oura ring cost?

The Gen3 Oura ring comes in two styles—the classic plateau Heritage design with four metal options, starting at $299, and the sleek Horizon design with six metal options, starting at $349. Both styles have identical hardware capabilities! In addition, the Oura membership (which you’ll need to track your health trends and use the app to full capacity) is $5.99/month after the first month free with purchase, which is totally affordable considering I typically spend more on a single cup of coffee. Girl math!

First impressions

In order to properly test my Oura ring, I wore it almost 24/7. I took it off while lifting heavier weights (just in case) and while doing some hands-on baking (so I didn’t accidentally bake my ring into a dinner roll) but the ring is totally waterproof, so I wore it in the shower, to bed, while traveling, while working out, in the office, out on a Friday night, and even during a trip to the beach. As long as your ring is well-fitted (hence my rec to use the free sizing kit), you shouldn’t be worried about it falling off—I always knew that it was either on my finger or charging by my bedside table.

Also, v important to note that the Oura ring is surprisingly comfortable. Back when I used to wear a smartwatch, I had the terrible habit of taking it off in my sleep in the middle of the night—but I’ve never had an issue with wearing my ring to bed. Plus, I was pleasantly surprised (!!) to discover that the ring charges fairly quickly, and that the charge usually lasts for multiple days.

Sleep tracking

I was mainly curious about the Oura ring because I had a feeling that the detailed sleep tracking would give me a way to track whether my sleep routine (mouth tape, supplements, tart cherry juice, breathing exercises, listening to brown noise, etc) actually made a difference or not. And boy oh boy was I right—I could see tangible evidence that magnesium supplements help me stay asleep all night, whereas a late dinner and drink always led to restlessness.

Each morning, the Oura app gave me a Sleep Score of 0 to 100, along with a couple of graphs displaying how I slept the night before. Over the month-long testing period, I learned that I fall asleep incredibly quickly—and that’s not always a good thing. I also thought that I slept through the night every single night, but apparently, I have intermittent periods of wakefulness pretty consistently. Yikes!

But whenever my Sleep Score was lower than I’d prefer, all I needed was a well-timed 20-minute power nap (don’t sleep on those, people, you will feel #REFRESHED) to bump up my score. As a chronic overachiever and nap aficionado, the fact that I could see how a quick daytime snooze improved my Sleep Score was one of my favorite features of the Oura ring.

Cycle Tracking

If you’re someone who recently landed on the cycle syncing side of TikTok, listen up! Not only does the Oura ring record your steps and sleep—it’ll also help you track your monthly menstrual cycle based on the subtle body temperature changes that happen in each phase. It even accurately predicted my period start date (!!) during the first month of testing, even though you’ll want to give your ring 90 days to start sending ~optimal~ predictions.

A couple weeks into testing the Oura ring, I started to notice an elevated temperature in my Oura app along with some pretty trash Readiness Scores (like, 40 out of 100). So, of course, I immediately assumed that I was about to get sick and just hadn’t started showing symptoms yet. But then I hopped on a call with Neta Gotlieb, Oura’s Reproductive Health Lead, who informed me that I was probably just in the luteal phase of my cycle—aka the second half of the menstrual cycle that starts after ovulation and ends with your period.

"One of the most robust signs across the menstrual cycle is temperature,” Gotlieb explained to me. “The body goes cool, warm, cool, warm throughout the cycle where the follicular phase is cool and the luteal phase is warm. You'll start seeing these beautiful patterns that are really easy to eyeball in the app."

Months later, I’m now able to scroll through my temperature history and notice the up, down, up, down patterns that indicate the monthly transition between the follicular and luteal phases. Body literacy FTW!

“And if you’re trying to conceive,” Gotlieb noted, “Oura has a partnership with Natural Cycles where anyone using the Fertility Awareness Method can basically replace the 5 A.M. temperature checks because the ring passively, continuously collects your temperature data.” You can check your daily fertility status in the Natural Cycles app which gives you a calculation based on your Oura data—how cool is that?

This also means that for anyone looking for a non-hormonal, digital, and FDA-approved form of contraception, Natural Cycles is able to identify which days are not safe to have unprotected sex.

Pregnancy Insights

Drumroll, pls, because Oura just rolled out a brand new feature as of March 2024: Pregnancy Insights! “This feature is ideal for someone who wants to understand exactly what’s happening in what feels like a brand new body,” Gotlieb explained. “You’ll be able to track gestational age as well as getting weekly educational messages about what typically happens in each stage of pregnancy.”

Forget the apps that tell you that your baby is the size of a lemon or an avocado—this is way better. You’ll be able to track your progress through each trimester (three rings to represent each of the three trimesters) and receive insight into what changes you might expect to see, such as an increase in body temp right after conception or an increased heart rate in your second trimester.

It’s worth noting that although the ring is pretty darn magical, it’s not psychic, unfortunately, so it won’t automatically detect pregnancy. You’ll have to activate specific insights either by selecting the “Positive Pregnancy Test” tag or manually turning them on under “Women’s Health” in your app settings.

But FWIW, Gotlieb told me that there are several Facebook groups and Reddit threads filled with people discussing how they discovered they were pregnant before it was confirmed via a test—simply based on irregular changes in their usual Oura stats. This goes to show that the longer your usage history is, the better you’ll be at detecting biometric changes and interpreting any deviations from your usual baseline during major events like pregnancy. Sick, right?

Fitness tracking

The best part of Oura’s fitness tracking capabilities? The step tracker, baby!! The Oura ring, which I wore 24/7, picked up a much more accurate step count (9000 to 10,000 steps a day) than the rough estimate in my iPhone’s Health app, which usually registered only 7000 to 8000 steps a day. That’s not only ~incredibly satisfying~, but also v helpful as my app would take the previous day’s total activity into account when recommending how much exercise I needed today. And I’m not personally a calorie counter, but they do offer that particular insight, as well.

When you exercise, the Oura ring will detect activity and suggest a category for tagging that workout. I found it wasn’t always 100% accurate in knowing what activity I had done (one time it suggested sports after I carried my groceries up multiple flights of steps) but you can easily manually select your workout before logging it. Note that the Oura ring isn’t the best at automatically tracking the caloric burn from non-cardio activities like strength training or weightlifting, though, and depending on how heavy you’re lifting, you might want to take your Oura ring (as you would any ring) off—just in case.

Pros and Cons

Debating whether or not to buy one? Here are some things you should keep in mind before investing in the Oura ring:

Pros:

Cons:

So, is the Oura ring really worth it? Short answer: YES.

If you are looking for an easy-to-use, discreet wearable device that’ll help you figure out exactly what’s happening in your body, the Oura Gen3 ring might just be worth the splurge. The 24/7 ring is completely comfortable, charges super quickly, and provides extensive, easy-to-interpret data for anyone looking to dive deeper into understanding their sleep, exercise, stress, breathing, heart rate, and menstrual cycle. You can spend pre-tax FSA or HSA money on the monthly $5.99 subscription, and you can wear the Oura ring while showering, washing your hands, or even scuba diving without damaging it at all.

IMO, she’s a keeper—and doesn’t that have a nice ring to it?

Why trust us?

Hannah Oh is a self-proclaimed nerd for biometrics and sleep optimization. Along with writing about the best sales and deals to spend your hard-earned money on, she has tested a variety of sleep-tracking devices and wearables on her quest to create the perfect bedroom sanctuary in the middle of noisy New York City. She is never seen without her Oura ring and has been known to tell strangers on the street why they should buy one, too.

You Might Also Like

• Here’s What NOT to Wear to a Wedding

• Meet the Laziest, Easiest Acne Routine You’ll Ever Try