The Ikea Varmblixt Smart Lamp Fills a Donut Hole in My Life

The intersection of smart home and decorative lighting often feels like Las Vegas to me: gaudy, excessive, and a place I don’t particularly want to take my money. I’m especially talking about impractical things like vibrant geometric panels or modular light bars that go overboard with oversaturated, unnatural color. The bright type of lighting makes it seem like it’s there mainly to live in the background of thousands of YouTube videos as an attention-grabbing option for interesting tastes.

However, a purely decorative smart light doesn’t have to be an attractive detail. Sometimes, it might be a light-colored, 12-inch-wide, pillowy glass donut. That’s exactly what you get with Ikea’s new Varmblixt smart lamp. You also get a lamp that works well mounted on a table or on the wall. And the Wormblixt is compatible with whatever smart home ecosystem you use, thanks to Ikea’s “matter over thread” implementation (as long as you have a thread bordering router, like the recent Apple HomePod or Amazon Echo speakers). Still, if you don’t care about that kind of thing, it works fine with the small, two-button remote it comes with.

I find it difficult to justify spending money on purely decorative lighting. But still, there’s something very charming about the delightfully shapely, colorful Wormblixt Donut Lamp.

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a pleasing decoration

I’ll go ahead and immediately note that this light is part of Ikea’s Varmblixt collection, which includes several different sized lamps. Ikea doesn’t call it a “Warmblixt donut” or anything – small text under its name on the Ikea site differentiates it from the original donut-shaped Warmblixt with the words “LED table/wall lamp, dimmable smart/white glass color and white spectrum.” So for the sake of this review, let’s agree that when I say “warmblixt,” I mean a donut-shaped Matter-compatible smart lamp. got it? Onward with the review.

Being a man of a certain age, I’ve fantasized about being able to live the kind of minimalist lifestyle that complements Ikea’s products. I always loved the simplicity of its products, and the idea that I could somehow conquer my clutter and accomplish the hipster home look, circa 2012. Wormblixt would fit well into that aesthetic, but fortunately, it also works fine with the actual ambiance of my home, which could probably be described as cluttered furniture with some preference for the Victorian era.

Ikea has done a great job of making sure that the colors coming out of this lamp look exactly as I expected them to when I selected a color in the Apple Home app. Warmblixt also uses Matter’s adaptive lighting feature, which means it gradually changes the color temperature of its white light throughout the day, from a bright, blue hue in the morning to a warm yellow as the day wears on. When the illumination was at its peak, it was nice and uniform throughout the frosted glass shell in rooms with no other light, but it would take on a spotty appearance if other light sources were interfering. It was more obvious the more the lamp dimmed, but I didn’t hate it. In fact, it might be fun to try to match the color of the wall behind the lamp, so that its color and the light coming from my windows blend inside the lamp.

Wormblixt won’t let you forget that this is, first and foremost, a decorative object. You know, accent lighting! According to the box it shipped in, it reaches about 120 lumens, or what you might expect from a dim bedside lamp or a crummy flashlight. It gets so blurry that I can still detect some color at its lowest brightness. This was an interesting effect at the time, especially during the day, as it seemed as if the glass itself was tinted rather than burning from the inside.

I like that there’s no chance of accidentally blinding myself temporarily with this lamp, but I found its extremes to be just one touch Very blurry. In the pitch darkness of my bedroom and with the Warmblixt light being so bright, I could immediately see the area around the lamp, but just a few feet away, things were in deep shadow.

As far as storing the thing goes, the Wormblixt has padded feet on the bottom so you can set it on a tabletop, but I found it best mounted on the wall. You can take the top glass off by pressing a button to release a clip on the base, allowing you to use the base as a mounting plate, but I found it was easier to hook the whole thing onto the screw I was using. It’s good to be cautious either way; The outer glass shell of the Wormblixt will definitely break if you drop it.

One thing to note: If you’re considering the smart lamp version of the Wormblixt because you think it might somehow be better than its original, non-smart predecessor, you should probably try seeing them side by side in a store. They may cost the same and have a similar overall look, but there are important differences. The original is encased in a caramel-colored shiny glass shell that resembles a giant piece of hard candy and emits warm, cozy light. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get the same quality light from the smart version.

Thread, Matter and smart home compatibility

You don’t actually need your smart home to use the Warmblixt as a lamp. A button next to the power cable works fine for turning it on and off, and the Ikea Bilresa two-button remote that comes with it pairs with it out of the box. You’ll need to supply the two AAA batteries required for the remote, but once you’ve done that, it can turn the lamp on or off, dim or brighten it by pressing the top or bottom buttons — which aren’t labeled, but have a large divot at the top — and can easily cycle through colors by double-tapping its buttons.

If you want to use it with your smart home, its Matter Over Thread implementation means you won’t need an Ikea Dirigera hub, but you will need a Thread Border router like the Apple HomePod Mini or the recent Amazon Echo speakers. It took less than a minute to connect the Wormblixt to my Apple Home network after a quick scan of the Matter QR code included beneath it. Once on my network, Wormblixt worked great. It was almost instant when I made changes to the Apple Home app, and it never became unresponsive during my nine days of testing.

There was only one thing about Wormblixt that really bothered me: the way she changes color. When it was paired with just the remote and nothing else, I could double-tap any button on the remote and it would easily make its way through a set of pre-selected colors. it is pleasant! But when I connected it to Apple Home it went away; If I changed the colors in the Home app, the change was sudden. Yet other color-changing bulbs, like the Lederson in my desk lamp, keep their change smoothly even when connected to my Home app. Also, once I paired Wormblix with Apple Home uncouple With Bilresa, and it seems like it’s one or the other; I couldn’t reassemble the remote with the lamp until I removed its miter binding. It’s a small bummer, but a bummer nonetheless.

$100 question

Wormblixt probably isn’t for everyone, and I suspect that if it is for you, you’ll already know it before reading this review. I’m one of those people, as it and its non-smart predecessor both cost the same $100. I wouldn’t necessarily buy it, but that has more to do with my income and preferences, rather than whether I think it’s worth it as a decorative item.

That said, if Wormblixt intrigues you enough and the price seems right, I say go for it. The build quality, the colors it produces, and its reliability on my network all point to a light I really won’t regret purchasing. I would even be tempted to leave it separate from my smart home because of the included remote. The big thing to keep in mind here is that the Wormblixt will never replace an existing lamp that was actually meant to illuminate a room. It’s pure eye candy, meant to influence your space, not take over it. And it does a pretty good job at that.