The Air Up is a hydration system that smells at you. The water bottle is rather like many different water bottles apart from a despair across the gap the place the water comes out. It is right here, across the spout, that you just snap in a ring-shaped pod infused with a fruity scent. Then, whenever you take a swig, you additionally take a sniff. The sensations of style and odor are commingled sufficient to trick your mind into pondering you’re sipping fruit-flavored water, though the scent puck by no means truly flavors the water inside.

If you’ve been on Instagram just lately, you might have seen one of many 6 billion sponsored advertisements for the Air Up. If these advertisements have made you interested by it, let me prevent some money and time: You can simply recreate the Air Up expertise by sipping some water whereas huffing a lemon-scented Glade Plug-In.

Smell Ya Later

The bottles are available in three sizes (16, 22, and 28 ounces), and also you get a selection between a tough plastic or insulated steel shell. Each bottle prices between $40 and $65, and a few odor pods are included together with your first buy. Additional pods are available in packages of three that value between $8 and $13 every. This is all very costly. Typically, you should buy a very good water bottle for between $20 and $35.

Air Up’s central shtick is its “patented Scentaste technology.” It’s based mostly on a neurological phenomenon known as retronasal olfaction, which refers to how scent impacts the notion of style behind the mouth. You might have heard the axiom that odor is 80 to 90 p.c of style. It’s not technically true, however there’s something to the concept, in line with Donald Katz, a professor of psychology at Brandeis University in Massachusetts who researches the interaction between scent and style. He says the science Air Up cites is legitimate.

“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 raring to play with that connection. You load the Air Up like so: Pour common unflavored water into the bottle, then connect a silicone lid with a straw threaded via the center and a round indent working across the straw. Place considered one of Air Ups’s proprietary scent pucks excessive of the straw, slide it down, and match it into the rubbery groove within the lid. When you drink via the straw, the in any other case flavorless water will probably be supplemented by the simultaneous odor hitting your nostril, tricking your mind into “tasting” the flavour you’re smelling.

That’s the concept, anyway.

Retronasal olfaction can closely affect how one thing tastes. In experiments, Katz says that altering the scent somebody inhales whereas consuming can change how they understand the flavour, even when the stuff of their mouth is in any other case precisely the identical. But whereas scent is a big a part of style, it isn’t a substitute 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.”