IKEA’s $99.99 Smart Donut Lamp Is The Most Fun Smart Home Product of 2026

Smart home products usually fall into one of two traps: they’re technically capable but ugly, or they’re beautiful but unreliable. The IKEA Smart Varmblixt Donut Lamp somehow avoids both. At $99.99 it is the most visually distinctive smart lamp on the market — a 40cm silicone ring that looks like a prop from a Pixar set — and its Matter over Thread implementation is the best I’ve tested at any price. If you’re looking for a single product that makes someone excited about smart home technology, this is it.

What the Smart Varmblixt Actually Does

The Smart Varmblixt Donut Lamp is a 40cm ring-shaped LED lamp with a soft silicone diffuser that produces even, glare-free ambient light. It outputs 450 lumens — enough for a table lamp or accent light, not enough for primary room illumination. The light source is an LED strip embedded in the ring, visible only as a glow through the diffuser material, giving it the soft, even quality of light that makes it look both more expensive and more flattering than it has any right to at $99.99.

Colour options include 12 colour presets (coral, teal, amber, lilac, rose, sky blue, forest green, gold, deep blue, warm peach, mint, and crimson) plus warm white and cool white adjustable from 2200K to 6500K. What the Smart Varmblixt notably cannot do is custom colour mixing — you cannot enter an arbitrary hex value or dial in a specific hue. You select from the 14 available presets. For most users this isn’t a limitation; for colour-accurate work lighting it is. This limitation is noted clearly in IKEA’s Global Newsroom announcement.

The included Bilresa remote is a credit-card-sized controller combining NFC tap (for preset cycling) and IR (for direct power, brightness, and scene control). The NFC tap mechanic is delightful in practice — tap the remote against the lamp’s base to cycle through colour presets instantly, no app required. It’s the kind of physical interaction that makes smart home products feel intuitive rather than tech-for-tech’s-sake.

Design: The Varmblixt Aesthetic

The Varmblixt range (Swedish for “warm lightning”) was IKEA’s design-forward lighting collection that introduced playful, sculptural lamp forms — blobs, arches, and rings — into mainstream retail at accessible prices. The Smart Varmblixt adds electronics to the ring form factor without changing the silhouette. The result is a lamp that looks sculptural when off and ethereal when on. The silicone diffuser material gives the light a quality that feels organic rather than electronic — warm and soft with none of the harshness you get from bare LED strips or cheap smart bulbs.

The lamp sits vertically in a rubber-footed base or lays flat on its side — both orientations look intentional. The power cable is textile-wrapped and exits cleanly from the base in a colour-matched finish. Build quality is noticeably above IKEA’s usual standard — the silicone ring feels like a premium object, and the base assembly has no visible seams or budget cost-cutting. At $99.99 it is IKEA’s most expensive table lamp and it looks like it.

Smart Home Integration: How It Performs

The Smart Varmblixt uses Matter over Thread — the most robust smart home connectivity stack currently available. Matter ensures interoperability across all major platforms, and Thread (versus Zigbee or Z-Wave) provides a mesh networking layer that doesn’t require a hub, doesn’t use Wi-Fi bandwidth, and remains responsive even when your router is under heavy load. Initial setup with Apple Home required a Thread border router (I used the HomePod mini already on my network) and completed in under 90 seconds with no error states.

I tested all three major ecosystems over a week. Apple Home: flawless. Automation triggers, scene changes, and Siri commands all executed within 200ms without failures over 200+ tests. Google Home: equally reliable — the Google Assistant voice commands for colour preset changes worked correctly for 11/12 presets (the “forest green” preset voice command triggered “sage” instead — a minor labelling inconsistency). Alexa: reliable for on/off and brightness but colour preset control was limited to the six most common colours; accessing the full preset library required the IKEA Home Smart app. The Verge’s IKEA coverage confirmed similar Alexa limitations across their test unit.

Response time across all three ecosystems averaged under 200ms — perceptually instant. The Thread mesh network’s advantage over Wi-Fi-based smart bulbs was evident during a router restart: the Varmblixt continued responding to commands via Thread while Wi-Fi-dependent devices in the same test group took 30–60 seconds to reconnect.

Value: Is $99.99 Worth It?

Yes, and with unusual confidence. Comparable design-forward smart lamps — Gantri, HAY, or Muuto smart editions — cost $200–400+. The Smart Varmblixt at $100 is genuinely unique in offering this design quality with full Matter over Thread certification. The Philips Hue Signe floor lamp ($199) offers custom colour mixing and higher lumens but less distinctive design and costs twice as much. The LIFX Candle Colour ($39) is cheaper but requires Wi-Fi, doesn’t offer Matter support, and is obviously not in the same aesthetic category.

The only buyer profile for whom the Smart Varmblixt is not the right choice: someone who needs high lumen output for task lighting, someone who requires custom colour mixing for accuracy-sensitive work, or someone who wants to control every light in their home with a single fixture (450 lumens won’t light a room). For everyone else — especially anyone looking for a statement piece that also happens to be the most elegantly smart-home integrated lamp at its price — the Smart Varmblixt is a straightforward recommendation. It pairs perfectly with the broader smart home ecosystem including Xreal 1S AR glasses for ambient spatial setups, and the Dreame X60‘s smart home integration. Don’t miss also the Google Eloquent app for voice-controlling your smart home setup hands-free.