Please Do Not Make Fun of My Neck Fan
5 min read
This summer, one question has been living rent-free in my head: Do I look like a giant dork? Faced with miserable heat and humidity, I have surrendered to JisuLife, the maker of a plastic sea-green neck fan that spurts cool air onto my face. Mine was $28.30; it’s rechargeable and looks absolutely ridiculous—like if Beats headphones had a baby with a travel pillow.
At one point, I put on my best summer clothes for a dinner out and then wrapped the device around my neck before leaving the house. It felt about as embarrassing as showing up to a wedding in a tuxedo and Crocs. The neck fan is not glamorous, but fashion be damned. My JisuLife and its 78 air vents accompany me on my daily commute, during which I once spotted a pair of teens in matching white neck fans holding hands (true love!). Last week, I wore the gadget to the grocery store and caught a knowing glance from an elderly woman doing the same. Simone Biles’s mom and dad each had one on as they sat in the audience at the Paris Olympics. They are everywhere at Disney World. Jenna Bush Hager has touted them on the Today show. With good behavior, Amazon warehouse workers can earn enough “swag bucks” to buy one to stay cool on the job.
The neck fan is a heat gadget for hot times, a piece of technology designed to make extreme weather a bit more bearable. “Live chill, stay cool” goes JisuLife’s slogan. It’s been a gross summer, as it likely will be next year, and the year after that, and the year after that. At this rate, it may soon be weird not to wear one.
The longer I wear my neck fan, the easier it is to imagine a future in which neck fans are as much part of the summer as sunglasses and flip-flops. A future in which neck fans go the way of airpods—first ugly, then ubiquitous. The promise of the neck fan is that you can always be just a button away from your own personal microclimate. That even though many Americans already shuffle between air-conditioned homes, air-conditioned cars, and air-conditioned offices, the answer to extreme heat is to buy something like wearable AC for those pesky moments when you still have to be outside.
But even AC is an insufficient solution for 13 straight monthly heat records, 129-degree temps, and pavement hot enough to give you third-degree burns. Meanwhile, the neck fan is about as high-tech as a microwave or a beard trimmer. The model I have has one button that powers it on and toggles between three speeds. (Thankfully, the fans are bladeless, presumably so they won’t accidentally give you a shave.) You plug the fan in to recharge it. You can get neck fans with “AI mode”—whatever that means—and $200 ones with special thermal cooling chips, but for the most part, they are cheap products from such esteemed brands as FrSara, OLV, Penkou, and Jmostrg.
In other words, neck fans are just more electronic junk—the kind that litters e-commerce sites such as Temu and TikTok Shop and is hawked online by influencers. That’s how neck fans first began to take off to such a degree that even Wirecutter decided to review them. “I saw a Twitter video that said the neck fan was cooler than an air conditioner and thought, This is utter nonsense—this is the stupidest thing,” Thom Dunn, who wrote the site’s guide, told me. “Why did 4 million people watch this?”
It is pretty stupid, scientifically speaking. “These devices will almost certainly have no impact on actual body core temperature,” Chris Tyler, a researcher at the University of Roehampton, in London, who has studied the relationship between the neck and heat regulation, told me in an email. A neck fan “will probably make people FEEL cooler but won’t make them any cooler,” he said. When the temperature isn’t hot enough to be truly risky, though, feeling better counts for something. At the lowest setting, my JisuLife is useless, even in pretty mild heat. But spending an hour outside at 90 degrees became more tolerable with my neck fan cranked all the way up—which I came to realize only when the device ran out of battery and whirred to a stop.
That extra bit of comfort has proved alluring. Dunn eventually came around: The Wirecutter guide calls the devices “more pleasant than you’d expect.” Leo Chen, the head of marketing at JisuLife, told me that the company has sold $40 million worth of neck fans in the United States so far this year—already double that of last year. As of this spring, you can buy JisuLife neck fans at Costco, CVS, Best Buy, and Tractor’s Supply. Another brand, Torras, sells luxe iterations, with cooling and heating options, that are available at Home Depot and Lowe’s—and has partnered with the Dallas Mavericks to promote the device. As Dunn told me, “Neck fans are the perfect serendipity of global warming and global markets.”
Lots of other devices have a similar promise: It is hot, and technology can help. There are stylish handheld fans (Drake has even used one), belt fans that puff out your shirt and make you look like the Michelin man, and an e-watch that promises to be “your personal thermostat.” Sony sells a V-neck undershirt that also functions as a personal AC. Perhaps extreme heat is destined to change how we interact with technology. You may not need Ray-Ban smart glasses or a combination air fryer and an Instant Pot, but you may eventually need a heat gadget.
Perhaps the best use for a neck fan isn’t what is billed on all the product listings. One night last week, I came home from work and plopped down in front of the TV. Out of a mix of laziness and frugalness, I resisted the impulse to reach for the AC remote and instead slung on my neck fan. Cool and comfortable, I turned on a mindless Netflix reality show, and settled into the couch. A few minutes in, the camera panned to one of the main characters. She was wearing a neck fan.
