Are you an Ōura Bore?

What’s your Readiness Score? How much deep sleep did you get last night? Are you experiencing much heart variability right now?

To some, these may sound like pick-up lines. But for those in the know, it’s a conversational segue that grants access to an inner circle of chat – one where personal metrics such as calorie count, sleep efficiency and stress levels are compared with fervour. This is the cult of Ōura, the health-tracking ring of trust. 

You’ll spot Ōura converts before you hear them. They’re the high flyers wearing a thick gold band – most often around their index finger. Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn wears one. So do Gwyneth Paltrow, biohacker Dave Asprey, fashion designer Gabriela Hearst and tech bro entrepreneurs like Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff. (Paltrow and Benioff even invested.) Membership costs from £299 for a ring, and then a £5.99-a-month subscription for the app. 

The rings, sold in finishes including brushed titanium, silver and rose gold, use embedded medical-grade technology and sensors. The ring sends information about body temperature and heart rate via Bluetooth – providing wearers with insights into their circadian rhythm, from quantity of REM to sleep efficacy and latency (the amount of time it takes to actually fall asleep). It then interprets this data into strategic health advice via a Readiness Score and a set of goals to try to hit each day. “Ōura appeals to the left-brain mentality where if you can measure it, you can manage it and better it,” says Tom Hale, Ōura chief executive. “We have a long list of C-suites wearing Ōura, from IBM to Delta Airlines; we call them our business athletes.”

If you can measure it, you can manage and better it

Ōura was founded in Finland in 2013 by computer scientists Petteri Lahtela, Kari Kivelä and Markku Koskela. By 2022, its $2.3mn seed funding had become a $2.55bn valuation. Currently, there are more than 2.5mn Ōura wearers in more than 98 countries (the company sold 1.5mn rings in the past two years); a new UK retail partnership with John Lewis will take the device to a broader audience still. 

Rosa Park, the Los Angeles-based owner of Francis Gallery, says her gold ring complements her gold Cartier watch; biohacker Asprey calls it “sleek and comfortable”, while Kenya Hunt, editor-in-chief of Elle UK, appreciates the fact it doesn’t look like a wearable at all. “It blends in with my [other] jewellery and works well as a stacking piece.” 

In today’s switched-on, stressed-out world, sleep has almost become a luxury itself – and mastering the art of it is now a niche flex in this era of self-optimisation. Ōura was one of the world’s first devices to offer a digital window into our unconscious hours. “Few of us are particularly good at [sleep],” says Hale. He claims Ōura wearers get on average an extra 40 minutes of quality sleep each night. “People are modifying their behaviour,” says Hale of how people start self-correcting their daily habits: alcohol and eating late are among some of the key factors in determining one’s quality of sleep. 

Each night’s metrics are an opportunity  – each morning scroll an education. Asprey says the data “teaches me which signals in my nervous system are worth listening to… If my ring tells me my heart-rate variability was low, I’ll skip a workout or just do some yoga,” he says. Ōura also uses its temperature gauge to alert wearers if they might be falling sick. 

Ōura’s efficiency owes a lot to its design. Rings give more accurate readings than wrist trackers, as here blood flow is less than 2mm away from the skin. Tattoos and darker skin tones can all hinder wrist readings; conversely, the palm side, where Ōura’s sensors sit, is generally lighter and tattoo-free. 

Women currently make up 59 per cent of Ōura’s customer base, with twentysomething women the fastest-growing demographic (they grew 2.6 times to more than 186,000 in the past year). A partnership with Natural Cycles, the first FDA-cleared digital contraceptive that works using body temperature readings, has also helped shift the needle. Ōura automatically feeds data into Natural Cycles, which otherwise relies on manual thermometer readings. 

Hale emphasises that this is part of a wider health shift: Ōura “started” with sleep but the heart is its next big focus. A newly launched feature tracks cardio capacity and cardiovascular age. Both things can be reduced by changing daily habits. Says Hale: “We collect a million heartbeats a week, so we can detect outliers through pulse wave velocity (PWV) – the recorded speed at which blood flows through veins.” PWV can detect flexibility or stiffness in the circulatory system, which is “an early predictor of all sorts of heart disease”. 

While Ōura is definitely not a certified medical device – “if there’s anything out of range, you should see a doctor”, Hale advises – the idea is that wearers can go to their doctors informed. Hale’s hope is that Ōura will become a necessary tool in medical prevention. “We imagine this world where you become a driver, not the passenger, in your health journey.” The Ōura cult powers on. 

This article has been amended to reflect the fact that Natural Cycles is the first FDA-cleared digital contraceptive, and that Ōura’s automatic data readings do not increase its efficacy or reliability.