Review: The Air Up Water Bottle

If you’ve been on Instagram recently, you may have seen one of the 6 billion sponsored ads for the Air Up. If these ads have made you curious about it, let me save you some time and money: You can easily recreate the Air Up experience by sipping some water while huffing a lemon-scented Glade Plug-In.

The bottles come in three sizes (16, 22, and 28 ounces), and you get a choice between a hard plastic or insulated metal shell. Each bottle costs between $40 and $65, and some odor pods are included with your first purchase. Additional pods come in packages of three that cost between $8 and $13 each. This is all very expensive. Typically, you can buy a very good water bottle for between $20 and $35.

Air Up’s central shtick is its “patented Scentaste technology.” It’s based on a neurological phenomenon called retronasal olfaction, which refers to how scent affects the perception of taste in the back of the mouth. You may have heard the axiom that smell is 80 to 90 percent of taste. It’s not technically true, but there is something to the idea, according to Donald Katz, a professor of psychology at Brandeis University in Massachusetts who researches the interplay between scent and taste. He says the science Air Up cites is valid.

“Taste and smell are so intimately connected that research in my lab suggests that we're making a mistake thinking of them as two separate systems,” Katz says.

Air Up is eager to play with that connection. You load the Air Up like so: Pour regular unflavored water into the bottle, then attach a silicone lid with a straw threaded through the middle and a circular indent running around the straw. Place one of Air Ups’s proprietary scent pucks over the top of the straw, slide it down, and fit it into the rubbery groove in the lid. When you drink through the straw, the otherwise flavorless water will be supplemented by the simultaneous smell hitting your nose, tricking your brain into “tasting” the flavor you’re smelling.

That’s the idea, anyway.

Retronasal olfaction can heavily influence how something tastes. In experiments, Katz says that changing the scent someone inhales while eating can change how they perceive the flavor, even if the stuff in their mouth is otherwise exactly the same. But while scent is a huge part of taste, it is not a replacement for it.

“Smell changes taste, but taste isn't just whatever smell tells it,” Katz says. “You can stuff as much raspberry up your nose as you want, that's not going to make you taste raspberry.”

I asked my colleagues and fellow water bottle aficionados Adrienne So and Julian Chokkattu to also test the Air Up system. Adrienne chose a peach-flavored disc (which she said smelled closer to banana), and Julian picked blueberry. Both visibly recoiled when sipping on their bottles for the first time. I also took a bottle home and presented it to my partner without any context. She chose a flavor (raspberry lemonade) and wiggled the scent puck onto the bottle’s rubbery spout. She took a single sip and exclaimed an enthusiastic, “What the fuck?” She gets targeted ads for Air Up on Instagram now and says she will never forgive me for it.

Personally, I do not enjoy Air Up’s scents. Air Up says the smells are all derived from natural flavors, but the scents emanate from the pods with the stinging potency of a cologne ad lurking in the pages of a print magazine. I suppose it does retronasally olfact the sensation of taste, but the experience is off-putting and barely evokes whatever colorful picture of fruit is on the package. It tastes like you’re sipping water while also smelling a tropical-themed scratch-n-sniff sticker.

Strangely, the scent both underwhelms initially and long overstays its welcome. Even if it doesn’t impart a strong flavor while you’re drinking, the scent-taste lingers in the silicone nozzle. After cycling through a few pods, the rubber takes on a cloying amalgamation of scents that I can detect even without a pod attached. In time, drinking from the bottle is like taking a big whiff of chemical potpourri.

Air Up’s central selling point for its product is self-delusion. After all, the goal is to fool your brain into thinking you’re sipping something delightful when actually you’ve just garnished your drink with an air freshener. Once you understand the trick behind Air Up’s magic show, your brain can easily distinguish between what you smell and what you taste. There’s definitely something there affecting the flavor, but the taste of the water and the scent feel like separate entities. It is entirely possible I am just a grump about it, and other people may be more inclined to suspend their disbelief and let themselves enjoy the taste-adjacent aromas.

If you can't get on board with the Air Up's scent-to-flavor mind fuckery, you may still be interested in using it as a regular water bottle, sans scent. It fails here too.

The problem is the straw. You know how a straw stops working right once it has a crack or a hole in it? Well, there is an extra hole in the Air Up straw, near where the straw and silicon nipple meet on the lid. It’s meant to align with a hole in the scent puck, where it allows the fruity aromas to be pulled into the straw and percolated into the water stream while you’re drinking. In practice, it prevents you from getting a full swig while also making gurgling wet fart noises.

The only way to prevent this flow pas is to push the scented disc down so it covers the hole. This is what Air Up calls its deactivated position, which also disables the smell-o-rama and stops pulling any scent from the attached pod. And yes, this means you can’t just ditch the pods and use the Air Up as a regular water bottle. Without a scent pod jammed into the locked position to cover up the hole in the straw, it doesn’t suck right.

This is a shame, because Air Up makes a case for itself as a sustainable product. If you guzzle water like I do, you’ll go through one of Air Up’s pods in about three days. That adds up. Air Up says both the pods and the plastic casing they come in are “made from recyclable materials.” Still, their recyclability is going to vary widely depending on where you live. For instance, the pods do not have the universal triangle symbol that would indicate they’re recyclable in the US. This is a problem because the sheer volume of plastic on this planet is a growing emergency. Air Up says it is trying to make compostable pods, but it hasn’t shared any details on when that might happen. In the meantime, if you’re concerned about reducing your plastic waste (and you absolutely should be), the answer is not to buy a water bottle that can only function when equipped with single-use plastic pods, even if they’re recyclable.

The Air Up overcomplicates a good thing. It wants to have its sustainable vessel and make it smell like cake too. You have better options for a reusable water bottle. Don’t buy this one.

Update, October 14, 2023: An earlier version of this story stated that Air Up said its pods are made with some recycled plastics. Air Up does not make that claim.