The Neck Fans Are Coming

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After successive heat waves across the country this summer, people finally found an unexpected source of relief: the neck fan. Consumer-product geniuses made the latest model look like Beats headphones, and suddenly they were on many hot, hot necks. Why did the neck fan take off? Does it actually cool you down or just make you feel cooler? And what is the neck fan’s relationship to climate change?

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Saahil Desai, who notices new and interesting things at the intersection of technology and consumer culture. Desai brings his own beloved neck fan to the studio and answers the question: Of all wearable technology, why did this one manage to break through social norms? And what does this mean for the future of an industry that has promised a lot of innovation but struggled to introduce genuinely new wearables into people’s daily lives?

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Newscaster: The last seven years are the hottest seven years ever recorded.

Newscaster: Breaking even more heat records this week, the National Weather Service says this summer is the hottest in history.

Newscaster: Many cities are on track to experience their hottest summer on record.

[Music]

Hanna Rosin: The summer of 2024 broke heat records all around the world, just like the summer of 2023 and the summer of 2022. But don’t worry—the clever consumer-goods industry has thought up a solution. Instead of telling you what it is, I’ll let you hear it.

Saahil Desai: Can you hear it?

Rosin: Wait, that’s the neck fan? It sounds freaking insane.

[Fan noise]

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic. And this week: the neck fan, an odd bit of wearable tech designed for our warming planet. Senior editor Saahil Desai often writes about the intersection of technology and consumer culture.

And after reporting on neck fans, he brought his own into the studio for me to hear.

Desai: It’s like if you put a battery inside a mosquito, and we’re wearing it a centimeter away from your ear is how it feels. It’s just a constant buzzing.

Rosin: But how is that soothing? Like, how does that not override the fact that you’re a little bit cooler, that noise?

Desai: I don’t know. I’m someone who sleeps with a with white-noise machine and hated it for, like, the first two days, and now I just cannot sleep without a white-noise machine on at night. So I just feel like you get used to it and it’s kind of nice.

Rosin: I don’t think I can concentrate until you turn that thing off. (Laughs.)

[Music]

Rosin: Sales of neck fans have boomed over the last year. At the Paris Olympics, organizers wanted an air-conditioning-free Olympic Village, but a summer heat wave in France meant that you would often see neck fans on athletes and their families, most notably Simone Biles’s parents. Neck fans are a wearable technology that people seem to be actually wearing, unlike, say, VR goggles.

Desai: What has been interesting to me is what it means for the future of wearable technology writ large and whether it positions itself as somewhat of an inflection point.

Obviously, you don’t walk around and see tons of people wearing their Apple Vision Pro goggles or any other VR goggle all the time, even though, you know, Facebook quite literally changed its name to Meta to signal the significance of this future that maybe all of us would be doing this. But you do walk around and you see people wearing neck fans. So I think these cooling gadgets are sort of the near future of wearable technology.

So many people already have AirPods and Apple Watches, and now the next step are these cheap gadgets to help us cool down as summers keep getting hotter.

Rosin: Next step because they aren’t a copy. People have always worn headphones and watches. An Apple Watch is just basically a high-tech watch. But what’s harder is creating something new. There is no precedent for wearing a fan around your neck, no set social norm. And with things heating up, it may be the first truly new kind of wearable to catch on.

[Music]

Rosin: Okay, so confession: I’ve never worn one. So let’s just slow this down: What is it, and what does it do?

Desai: So you wear it around your neck. It’s sort of, I would say, a mix of, like, Beats over-ear headphones and a travel neck pillow. So you wear it around your neck, and it just, like, spurts air into your neck and face a little bit. And so what’s obviously great about that is that you just turn it on and just leave it there. You don’t have to hold anything. It looks absolutely ridiculous, but it’s very hands off. You don’t have to do anything. And so I think that is what has made it just so popular.

Rosin: What does it claim to do? Like on the box, what does a neck fan say it’s going to do for your life?

Desai: Some of the branding around neck fans is so extreme that it’s ridiculous and amazing. I saw so many claims of, like, personal air conditioners and ridiculous graphics of neck fans covered in ice, as if you could just put on this gadget in, like, 120-degree weather in Phoenix or whatever and do whatever you want. Obviously, it’s not that. It’s just a fan around your neck. It’s nothing like an air conditioner.

Rosin: Okay, we’re going to have to talk about all the ways in which this spread, because I do feel like the neck fan is everywhere. I’m going to tell you my brief history of the neck fan.

So, a couple of years ago, I began to see it here and there. Like, I may have read something in The Cut about the neck fan, but it was a cheesy-looking thing. It was like a little string. And then my son, who’s always hot—I got him a neck fan, but it was truly a piece of junk and, you know, it was here and there but not a lot. And then all of a sudden, this summer, came those neck fans that look like Beats, you know? Like, they have kind of a fashion presence.

But I still don’t know, though, if it’s a piece of junk or if it’s something. Like, I can’t tell if this is the first good piece of wearable technology that has been invented, and now we have crossed the line, or if it’s just literally junk and I’ll never see one again.

Desai: I think it’s sort of like Schrödinger’s gadget, where it’s a little bit of both. It’s definitely junk in a lot of ways. I mean, in the simplest sense, it’s junk in the sense that a lot of necks fans are extremely cheap and likely shoddily made.

I think I probably got, you know, all things considered, one of the better neck fans. It was like $28 dollars on Amazon. But you can find neck fans on sites such as Temu for $10 or $12. It’s definitely indicative of just how all these products are pretty cheaply made. But I think that the product is also—it’s both junk but also good junk, if that makes sense.

Like, I was pretty skeptical of this neck fan. But also, it’s really just nice to wear one. I think the fact that they are so pervasive is a sign of that—that even if these products are not the Rolls Royce of gadgets, they’re still nice to have around. I mean, the neck fan is definitely sort of part of this way in which gadgets have just become cheaper.

Rosin: And why? Like, what are the things that led to gadgets being everywhere and cheaper?

Desai: In large part, it is because of just dramatic declines in the cost of lithium-ion batteries, right? Like, the cost of these batteries have decreased something like 97 percent in the last three decades.

They’re the same batteries that power electric cars. You know, that’s what enables Teslas to happen. But in a sense, like, every gadget is now a lot like an EV because these lithium-ion rechargeable batteries can also be really small and powerful in a gadget like a neck fan. And so that’s enabled, you know, e-scooters that you see on the streets, perhaps, but also hyper-cheap products like the neck fan.

[Music]

Desai: As we’ve been discussing, it’s potentially the future of wearable technology, but it just encapsulates so much of what’s going on in e-commerce right now, where all these gadgets that have gotten cheaper and there’s just so much variety of things you can buy, and the neck fan sort of rises above that because it’s precisely engineered for a moment of hot weather. It also is junk but also effective.

So it just seems, like, almost made in a petri dish to take off in a moment like this one.

Rosin: After the break: the science of the neck fan. The trend is real, but are the devices themselves actually keeping us cool? That’s in a moment.

[Music]

Rosin: Okay, Saahil. So neck fans did this interesting thing, which is: successfully create a new social norm for a thing you wear on your body. Is that the factor? Like, is social acceptability the most important factor that makes a gadget ubiquitous like this one?

Desai: Yes and no. I mean, I think, to some degree, a lot of this is mediated by social media and algorithms, right? There have been a lot of videos on social media, and TikTok in particular, of people wearing neck fans, which then might send them to, like, TikTok Shop, where they can buy a really cheap neck fan.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Desai: But also, a lot of this is what’s seen as cool but also what’s seen as effective. I think that there are a lot of gadgets that go viral for a minute, but then people spend the $12 on them and then realize that they are literally functionally junk.

Rosin: Uh-huh.

Desai: Whereas the neck fan is junk, in a sense, as we were talking about earlier. But also, it’s effective to some degree. You can wear one and immediately see the purpose.

Rosin: So you think it’s effectiveness. Interesting.

Desai: I think it’s effective in a sense, right? You’ll be shocked to hear that the companies selling these gadgets on Amazon aren’t exactly linking to peer-reviewed research about the efficacy of neck fans.

Rosin: (Laughs.) Right. Right.

Desai: But I asked a researcher who has studied how cooling the neck affects heat regulation in the body what he thinks of these products.

And I was actually really interested in his answer because it’s not straightforward, right? What he was saying is that cooling the neck, sort of as a neck fan would do, has a really big effect on how we feel in terms of the coolness that we feel but actually not all that much in terms of regulating your overall body temperature.

So what that means is: For someone like me—you know, I live in New York, where it gets hot in the summer but not, like, deathly hot—wearing a neck fan around definitely would make me feel cooler. But it could be a problem for someone who might want to use a neck fan to work outside in 110-degree weather for eight hours. A neck fan is not going to dramatically make someone safe in extreme heat. It could even backfire and give someone the sensation of feeling cooler without actually being cooler.

Rosin: Got it. So being cooler would require your core body temperature to cool. Like, you would have to measure the temperature.

Desai: Yeah, exactly.

Rosin: That’s interesting. But feeling cooler has a little bit of a positive effect because it’s nice, or it actually does have a positive health effect?

Desai: A little bit of both. Basically, if you’re outside in, let’s say, 90-degree weather, presuming you’re a healthy adult and are not highly susceptible to heat, being in that weather is not going to be a health concern for you, so feeling cooler can be a good thing.

I don’t think that wearing this neck fan has dramatically staved off any effects of the heat for me. But it’s just felt better in the way that, you know, wearing a hat and sunglasses helps you experience the heat in a better way.

Rosin: Got it. Like, if you’re walking around Brooklyn or walking around wherever you live with your neck fan, you’re feeling a little bit cooler, you have a little bit more energy, and you don’t have to lift heavy objects or do heavy manual labor, then fine.

Desai: Yeah, exactly.

Rosin: Let’s go just completely apocalyptic—like, worst-case scenario about what the neck fan represents in our culture—which is that you create your own microclimate, and it allows you to be marginally more comfortable.

And actually what you’re doing is contributing to the pile of cheap crap in the world, which actually exacerbates our climate problems, and so it’s us buying into a massive delusion. What do you think about that?

Desai: I think “massive delusion” is exactly the right way to put it.

Rosin: (Laughs.) I thought you were going to say it’s strong. I thought you were going to go—

Desai: No, no, no. I mean, like, look: I’m literally wearing a neck fan right now. I think that this has some value. But to think about this gadget in terms of cooling technology more broadly and especially air conditioning—the advent and rollout of air conditioning, I think, has had way bigger of an impact on American life and global life than I think a lot of people actually realize, right?

So many of us just go from air-conditioned homes to air-conditioned cars to air-conditioned offices, right? It’s just a string of AC. And I think there’s actually a lot of really interesting political-science research on how the advent of AC literally abetted the boom across the Sunbelt that has, like, dramatically shaped American politics. Like, this one technology has both changed our country and just let us sort of live through this lie where we can just always be air conditioned.

And I think that the neck fan is a next step in that, where it’s like, for those few moments when you still have to be outside, you can just put on a little gadget and, you know, have your own little AC.

Rosin: Got it. So in the mass shift that air conditioning has wrought, the neck fan just fills in the tiny holes.

Desai: And, of course, I don’t think that AC is a bad thing, to be clear. I think AC is one of the greatest inventions of all time, but it’s also sort of abetted this way of thinking, where we can just always AC our way out of hot weather, when of course that’s not true.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. So we are furthering the illusion that we control the climate and that there is nothing that’s gonna hurt us, because we can constantly manage any of the negative consequences of climate change.

Desai: Yeah, that the solution to heat is always just one more gadget away.

Rosin: Right. When actually what we’re doing is exacerbating the problem by continuously buying gadgets.

Desai: I think that’s exactly right. I mean, like, the energy effects of AC are extreme, and I don’t think the neck fan is quite like that, of course. But it’s all part of this way that these gadgets—to use the term that we’ve been using a lot, junk—all of them just end up in landfills with batteries that are quite destructive for the environment.

They’re full of all these minerals that have been mined—cobalt, nickel. They just pretty quickly end up in the trash because they either break or people decide they don’t need them or, you know, you lose your charger, which is a huge problem in this era of rechargeable gadgets. In the same way that fast fashion is all about mindless consumption without thinking of the consequences of that, I think the neck fan is like the $4 H&M T-shirt of gadgets.

Rosin: Wow, you’re really selling it here. Have you flung yours across the studio? I hate you, neck fan.

Desai: No, but I think this is actually helpful. It’s like, I feel really conflicted about this in a way that I waffle back and forth on it a lot of ways, where I do think that it is junk—it is not the answer—but also kind of is great, too.

Maybe a better way of saying that is, like, I feel like sometimes I’m the New York Times election needle when it comes to neck fans, where I bounce back between how I feel about it.

Rosin: It’s like 48 percent, 49 percent.

Desai: Yeah. Exactly.

Rosin: I mean, you’re not alone. Like, that’s basically the way everyone feels about an H&M T shirt. So it’s not an unfamiliar feeling. You’re like, Well, it’s cheap. It’s really nice. But I feel really bad. It’s a common sentiment.

The future that neck fans are pointing to: Have we turned the corner, and now wearable technology is with us and cool? Cool—both cools.

Desai: I don’t think we’ve necessarily turned the corner on wearable technology, but I think that the future of wearables seems more certain for these cooling gadgets, like the neck fan, than it does for something like the Vision Pro, where there’s all this hype around wearing these goggles all the time—and actually, maybe that still might make sense in a really hot world where you can’t go outside as often as you’d like, so you wear your Vision Pro, and you pretend that you’re on the beach or whatever. But there’s a lot of sort of hypotheticals along the way to that future—whereas, when I walk around near the office here in New York, I see neck fans all the time. They’re inescapable. So it seems like the future of wearables is already this kind of technology.

Obviously, it’s still early days for this category of gadget. At least, people have held, you know, battery-powered fans for forever or literally fanned themselves. But there’s obviously gonna be a lot of innovation here, too. So it’s really interesting to consider what this world might look like in 10 years or 15 years or 20 years.

Rosin: In your research, did you come upon either an area or a gadget that you were like, Yeah, that one? Like, That’s an area where people are gonna do something, or that’s a gadget that’s gonna take off?

Desai: Sony has already sold a V-neck undershirt that’s also a personal AC that, literally, you have, like, a button that you can use to control whether it heats you up or cools you down, and you just wear it like an undershirt. I think that’s wild. But what actually blew my mind even more than that was this company that sells, like, sort of like an e-watch that’s supposed to be like a personal thermostat. But I could totally see more innovation in that direction.

Rosin: You know what you’ve just done for me? I used to have a feminist rant about office air conditioning because it was forever set at a temperature that was more comfortable for men in suits, and it used to drive me crazy, like, having to bring my sweater to the office in the summer. Because of the world you just described to me, I now love office air conditioning because I want a world where there’s communal temperature.

Like, I can’t stand this microclimate—like, these endless ways in which we create our own, like, very personal, tailored climate. It’s like the Starbucksification of every damn thing. Like, I want it exactly how I want it, including climate.

Desai: There’s probably a future in that realm where we all have Venti microclimates with 30 add-ons of caramel syrup or whatever, right? Like, say everyone wears neck fans, maybe offices will just decide to keep the temperature at 77 degrees in the summer, and everyone just has to cool themselves.

Rosin: Exactly.

Desai: So I don’t know. It’s a weird future.

Rosin: Yeah, you’ll have, like, micro oxygen, too.

Desai: Yeah, right. Fun stuff.

Rosin: All right, Saahil. Well, thank you so much for painting us a future.

Desai: Thanks for having me.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak.

Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.