If you thought Oura’s collaboration with Gucci brought an element of luxury to the smart ring game, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Rival Ultrahuman has used the CES 2025 show floor to unveil Rare, a trio of luxury finishes made from precious metals.
The ‘Desert Collection’ comprises three pieces: Desert Snow, Desert Rose, and Dune. To you and me, that’s silver, rose gold, and gold. And these aren’t just your usual titanium coatings.
Instead, the collection has been crafted from 18K gold and PT950 platinum (for the silver one). Fancy. But the bad news is that this ensures they’ll only be available to pocket if you have £1,500-£2,000 (around $1,900-$2500) kicking about.
The Rare rings will also initially only be available from select locations in London (Selfridges) and Paris (Printemps), keeping the exclusivity at a maximum. However, the brand did tell us during a hands-on (fingers-on?) with the rings that it’s also considering other locations after this initial rollout.
At least from what we can glean, the Ultrahuman Rare doesn’t appear to add any new functionality to what we’ve tested with the Ultrahuman Ring Air. And that makes sense, given this one is all about the showy design.
That means the focus is still monitoring biometrics and health indicators such as sleep, HRV, and skin temperature. Those plumping for a Rare will receive a lifetime pass to Ultrahuman X, the brand’s device insurance plan, however, so there’s a little less jeopardy for chronic misplacers.
Wareable says:
With Ultrahuman’s tracking technology available for a mere fraction of these figures, the reflex when covering a luxury version (or really any wearable that launches in this bracket) is to dismiss it immediately.
It’s also especially jarring given that non-smart equivalents of rings made from the same premium materials in the Desert Collection only fetch a small fraction of what’s being asked here.
Yet, it’s still refreshing when a brand takes a different approach to the rest of the field.
As smart rings are increasingly being gifted and swapped out by couples for weddings or engagement rings, it’s also not an idea totally without merit. More than arguably any other sector in the industry, rings also have a genuine case as a unisex jewelry piece.
Smart ring designs across the industry still have some way to go before they look like truly natural pieces of jewelry, though, so it’s only fair to expect the Rare designs to land as well as the solid-gold, $10,000 Apple Watch Edition did.
