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Smart jewelry brings fashion and tech together in the perfect marriage of beauty and brains.
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We’ve tested all the smart jewelry out there, and the Bellabeat Leaf Urban is the best piece of smart jewelry for most women.
Wearables don’t have to be ugly or super masculine to be high tech and helpful. A number of small startups and a handful of big companies are finally making wearables for women. One of the most exciting new categories is smart jewelry.
Smart jewelry is turning the fitness tracker into a work of art. Some of these gorgeous pieces of jewelry use high-end materials like stainless steel, leather, and wood.
We’ve tested a lot of smart jewelry, and these are our favorite pieces. Every item in this buying guide offers special smart features, including fitness tracking, notifications, silent alarms, and even mindfulness reminders. Whether you want a smart necklace, bracelet, or watch, we’ve got you covered.
Here are our picks for the best smart jewelry:
Updated on 11/27/2018 by Malarie Gokey: Added the Leaf Chakra and Motiv smart ring. Updated prices and formatting.
Read on in the slides below to check out our top picks.
The best piece of smart jewelry overall
Why you’ll love it: You can wear Bellabeat’s Leaf Urban as a bracelet, necklace, or brooch to track your activity, stress level, mindfulness, and sleep.
Bellabeat’s original Leaf Nature was the first piece of smart jewelry I ever tried, and I’ve been a huge fan of the company ever since. I’ve worn some version of the Leaf almost every day for the past two years, and the Leaf Urban is my favorite piece of smart jewelry — period.
The Urban has a more modern and durable design that’s water resistant and eco-friendly. The leaf-shaped body is made out of recycled wood composite that mimics the look of stone. It’s encased in a metal clip that you can get in rose gold or silver. The metal part looks like the abstract veins of a leaf, and it opens up slightly to act as a brooch or a clip.
At either end of the Leaf Urban, the metal curves out into a loop so you can use it as a pendant on a necklace chain or wear it with a bracelet. Bellabeat includes a necklace and leather bracelet in the box along with your Leaf Urban and a tiny screwdriver for when you need to change the battery inside. The tracker is so popular that you can also find a number of handmade bracelets for it on Amazon.
The little wearable tracks your active minutes, calories burned, distance traveled, sleep duration, and sleep quality automatically. Just tap twice on the Leaf Urban to sync it with your companion app and see all the data.
You can also follow guided meditation sequences in the app and set silent alarms to wake up more peacefully in the morning. The app even has period and fertility tracking for those who are interested.
Using an algorithm, Bellabeat can predict your resistance to stress on any given day. For example: Say you didn’t sleep well, you haven’t exercised, and you’ve fallen behind on your meditation exercises — you may be more susceptible to stress on that day.
The Leaf aims to improve your well-being so you can live a more mindful, healthy life, and it does exactly that — with style.
Pros: Versatile design, eco-friendly materials, great mindfulness features, fitness tracking, and you never have to charge it
Cons: No notifications and replacing the battery after six months requires removing small screws
The best smart analog watch with a classic style
Why you’ll love it: Fossil’s Q Neely looks like a slim classic analog watch, but it can track your activity, buzz with notifications, and more.
If you want an analog watch with smarts, look no further than Fossil’s line of hybrid watches. My personal favorite is the new Q Neely with a rose gold casing and tan leather strap. Its subtle design is classic Fossil, and it fits in with any outfit.
The hours are marked by simple lines instead of numbers, giving it a minimalistic look. The Q Neely is also one of the slimmest hybrid watches Fossil has made yet. It’s much less bulky than the original Q watches, making it perfect for smaller wrists. The Neely is even water resistant up to 5 ATM, so you can get even swim with it if you want, though water will obviously ruin the leather strap.
The Q Neely comes in three different color combinations, including the aforementioned rose gold and tan color palette, a lovely purple-red cabernet color, and silver and black leather.
You can easily swap the 16mm straps with any other compatible watch bands — all you need is the same spring mechanism. Fossil offers a huge selection of straps for about $25 each.
One of the best things about the Q Neely is the way Fossil uses the watch face to communicate information in a subtle way. There’s a small sub dial in the center of the watch face where you can see how close you are to meeting your fitness goals. When you meet your goals, the watch hands do a celebratory dance around the screen as your watch vibrates.
You can also program the hands to alert you when your most important contacts text you. When my mom texts me, the watch hands go to 1. The three side buttons can also be set to open the selfie camera on your phone, control your music, or call your phone to help you find where you put it.
Even though it has all these high-tech features, you don’t have to charge the Q Neely, and the simple watch battery inside is easy to replace after your six-to-12 months of battery life runs out.
Fossil has many other Q hybrid watches in different styles, so if this one isn’t your cup of tea, you can also check out the other options. Related brands like Skagen and Kate Spade also have great hybrid watches
Pros: Gorgeous design, great activity and sleep tracking, notifications, an easily programmable smart button, and you never have to charge it
Cons: You have to replace the watch battery every six months
The best smart necklace
Why you’ll love it: Bellabeat’s Leaf Chakra is a beautiful piece of smart jewelry that uses real onyx or rose quartz in ts design.
Bellabeat also makes a very pretty piece of smart jewelry called the Leaf Chakra. It does all the same things as the Leaf Urban and original Leaf Nature. There are two main differences: The Leaf Chakra uses onyx and rose quartz stones in the pendant and it can’t be worn as a bracelet.
The Chakra has a durable design that’s water resistant and eco-friendly. The leaf-shaped body is made out of recycled wood composite that mimics the look of stone. In the center, you can have either onyx or rose quartz. The onyx is for the power chakra, while the rose quartz is for the love chakra.
The Leaf Chakra is encased in a metal clip that you can get in rose gold (with onyx) or silver (with rose quartz). You can wear it as a clip or a necklace.
Bellabeat includes a necklace in the box along with your Leaf Chakra and a tiny screwdriver for when you need to change the battery inside.
The little wearable tracks your active minutes, calories burned, distance traveled, sleep duration, and sleep quality automatically. Just tap twice on the Leaf Chakra to sync it with your companion app and see all the data.
You can also follow guided meditation sequences in the app and set silent alarms to wake up more peacefully in the morning. The app even has period and fertility tracking for those who are interested.
Using an algorithm, Bellabeat can predict your resistance to stress on any given day. For example: Say you didn’t sleep well, you haven’t exercised, and you’ve fallen behind on your meditation exercises — you may be more susceptible to stress on that day.
The Leaf aims to improve your well-being so you can live a more mindful, healthy life, and it does exactly that — with style.
Pros: Versatile design, eco-friendly materials, great mindfulness features, fitness tracking, and you never have to charge it
Cons: No notifications and replacing the battery after six months requires removing small screws
The best smart ring
Hollis Johnson/Business Insider
Why you’ll love it: The Motiv ring is a unique and more discreet alternative to traditional fitness trackers that you wear on the wrist, so you can free that space up for your favorite watch or jewelry.
Fitness trackers are known for providing a wealth of data at your fingertips with the help of a smartphone, but the Motiv Ring takes this idea to the next level by housing all the data directly on your finger.
I put the Motiv ring to the test to see how it held up against traditional fitness trackers. I took it on multiple runs, put it through the paces during my cross-training workouts, and wore it to bed to see just how accurate the sleep tracking is.
The thing that stood out to me the most when I first tried on the Motiv ring was the fact that it has a heart rate monitor. It’s amazing that this complicated sensor can fit in such a tiny ring and work as advertised. After my first run with the Motiv ring, I was impressed. I wore my Garmin Vivosport with a heart rate monitor on my wrist as well, so I could compare the data afterward. I did this for multiple runs, and each time, the heart rate recorded by the Motiv ring matched up almost exactly to the heart rate the Vivosport reported.
The Motiv automatically detects activities like running, so there is no need to open the app to begin your run. As I have found with most automatic activity detection, the distance and duration isn’t always exact. When I took it running, both the distance and time recorded for my run were a bit longer than the actual time and distance I ran. The calorie burn was also more generous than what my Vivosport reported, too. Still, I felt that the data collected by the Motiv ring was impressive considering that it was relying on the heart-rate monitor and its 3-axis accelerometer for all the data.
Once you’ve completed your workout, you can go in and manually label the activity, and enter the time frame that you were working out. Your “active minutes” will then be calculated based on your heart rate. It’s also water resistant up to 150 feet, so you can swim or shower with it on.
A few restless nights allowed me to see just how accurate the sleep tracking capabilities on the Motiv ring are. The tracker detected every time I woke up in the night, as well as any restless moments.
The app is easy to use, so you can check out all your stats and progress over time. The battery will last up to 3 days, it conveniently comes with two chargers, and it only takes about 90 minutes to become fully charged again.
If you’re worried about getting the wrong size, don’t — You get a sizing kit in the mail when you place your order. The kit will come before the ring so you can test out the different sizes and choose which one feels best.
While the sizes will fit most fingers, those with especially slender hands may find the Motiv Ring a little bulky at its width of 0.3 inches, but most reviewers found the design of the ring to be comfortable enough for all-day wear and praised its durability. The Motiv Ring comes in two different colors: rose gold and slate gray. — Kylie Joyner
Pros: Sizing kit provided for a perfect fit, tracks steps, distance, and sleep, includes built-in heart rate monitor to track active minutes, durable and waterproof up to 150 feet, easy to navigate app
Cons: Expensive, not as fully featured as some trackers
The best fitness jewelry
Why you’ll love it: The Misfit Ray is a sleek fitness tracker that’s as smart as a Fitbit, but looks a lot more like a piece of jewelry.
Not too long ago, Fossil Group bought the wearable startup Misfit. Misfit’s claim to fame was the attractive Shine fitness tracker, which required no charging and was easy to accessorize. Its second fitness tracker, the Ray, is very fashion forward, and Misfit is making tons of accessories for it.
My favorite thing about the Misfit Ray is how simple and subtle it is. With the right band, you could be fooled into thinking it’s just a nice, minimalist bracelet.
The Misfit Ray is a slim metal cylinder with a LED light for notifications. It comes with your choice of a silicon or leather band, but you can also buy a lariat necklace for it or a number of different bands to spice things up every now and then. If you don’t find what you’re looking for on Amazon, Misfit just added a new collection of Ray accessories to its own site.
Since it’s first and foremost a fitness tracker, the Ray can track specific activities, steps taken, calories burned, and distance traveled. It’s waterproof up to 50 meters, so you can even swim with it. You can see how well you slept and set silent alarms to wake yourself up gently.
If you want to get notifications and alerts for calls and texts, you can set that up, too. Misfit lets you program the LED light in the companion app to show different colors for each notification. The Ray can also trigger a few actions, including take a selfie, control music, turn on a Misfit Bolt light bulb, play Spotify, or control your Nest or Logitech Harmony smart home gadgets.
You never have to charge the Misfit Ray, but you do have to replace the batteries every four months. Luckily, they’re cheap and easy to find on Amazon.
Pros: Solid workout and fitness features, sleep tracking, smart notifications, and you never have to charge it
Cons: If you want the jewelry look, you have to buy accessories
