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

The intersection of the smart home and decorative lighting often feels like Las Vegas to me: gaudy, excessive, and a place I don’t especially want to take my money. I’m talking specifically about the impractical stuff like vibrant geometric panels or modular light bars that beam forth with oversaturated, unnatural color. The loud kind of lighting that feels like it’s mainly meant to live in the background of a thousand YouTube videos as an attention-grabbing substitute for interesting taste.

A purely decorative smart light doesn’t have to be a glaring statement piece, though. Sometimes, it can be a gently colorful, 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 either on a table or mounted to the wall. And whatever smart home ecosystem you use, the Varmblixt is compatible with it, thanks to Ikea’s “Matter over Thread” implementation (so long as you have a Thread border router, like a recent Apple HomePod or Amazon Echo speaker). Yet if you don’t care about that sort of thing, it works just fine with the small, two-button remote that it ships with.

I find it hard to justify spending money on purely decorative lighting. But all the same, there’s something very endearing about the delightfully curvy, colorful Varmblixt donut lamp.

A pleasing decoration

I’ll go ahead and note right away that this light is part of Ikea’s Varmblixt collection, which encompasses a lot of differently shaped lamps. Ikea doesn’t call it the “Varmblixt Donut” or anything—smaller text under its name on the Ikea site distinguishes it from the original donut-shaped Varmblixt with the words “LED table/wall lamp, dimmable smart/white glass color and white spectrum.” So for this review, let’s agree that when I say “Varmblixt,” I mean the donut-shaped Matter-compatible smart lamp. Got it? On with the review.

Being a man of a certain age, I’ve fantasized about being able to live the sort of minimalist lifestyle that Ikea’s products complement. I always liked the simplicity of its products, and the idea that I could somehow conquer my clutter and complete the hipster home look, circa 2012. The Varmblixt would fit well into that aesthetic, but blessedly, it also works fine with my home’s actual vibe, which can probably best be described as chaotic found furniture with some preference for the Victorian age.

Ikea has done a great job making sure the colors this lamp produces looked exactly as I expected them to when I picked one in the Apple Home app. The Varmblixt also uses the Adaptive Lighting feature of Matter, meaning it slowly shifts its white light color temperature throughout the day, from a bright, bluish tint in the morning to a warmer yellow one as the day wanes. When the light was at its brightest, it was nice and uniform across the whole frosted glass shell in rooms where there was no other light, but would take on a mottled look if there were other light sources interfering. That was more pronounced the dimmer the lamp got, but I didn’t hate it. In fact, it could be fun to try to match the color of the wall behind the lamp, so that its color and that of the light coming through my windows blended inside the lamp.

The Varmblixt will not let you forget that it is, first-and-foremost, a decorative item. 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 also gets so dim that I could still detect some color at its lowest brightness. It was an interesting effect at that point, especially during the day, because it almost looked like the glass itself was tinted, rather than being lit from inside.

I like that there’s no chance of accidentally temporarily blinding myself with this lamp, but I did find its peak just a touch too dim. In the pitch black of my bedroom and with the Varmblixt’s light set as bright as it’d go, I could see the area immediately around the lamp, but just a few feet away, things were in deep shadow.

As far as where to put the thing, the Varmblixt has padded feet on the bottom that let you set it on a tabletop, but I liked it best wall-mounted. You can pop the top glass off by pushing in a button to release a clip on the base, letting you use the base as a mounting plate, but I found it was easier just to hook the whole thing onto the screw I’m using. It’s good to be careful, either way; the Varmblixt’s exterior glass shell will certainly break if you drop it.

One thing to note: if you’re considering the smart lamp version of the Varmblixt because you think it might be somehow superior to its original, non-smart predecessor, you should probably try to see them in a store together. They might cost the same and have the same overall form, but there are key differences. The original is encased in a caramel-colored, glossy glass shell that looks like a giant piece of hard candy and gives off warm, cozy light. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t get the same quality of light out of the smart version.

Thread, Matter, and smart home compatibility

You don’t actually need your smart home to use the Varmblixt as a lamp. A button next to the power cable works just fine to toggle it on and off, and the Ikea Bilresa two-button remote it comes with is paired with it out of the box. You’ll need to supply the two AAA batteries the remote requires, but once you have, it can turn the lamp on or off, dim or brighten it by holding the up or down buttons—which aren’t labeled, but up is the one with the larger divot—and cycle through colors smoothly by double-tapping its buttons.

If you do 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 such as an Apple HomePod mini or a recent Amazon Echo speaker. Connecting the Varmblixt to my Apple Home network took less than a minute after a quick scan of the included Matter QR code on its underside. Once on my network, the Varmblixt worked very well. It was nearly instant when I made changes in the Apple Home app, and never became unresponsive during my nine days of testing it.

There was only one thing that really bothered me about the Varmblixt: the way it changes colors. When it was only paired with the remote and nothing else, I could double-tap either of the remote’s buttons and it would smoothly blend its way through a set of pre-chosen colors. It’s pleasant! But that went away when I connected it to Apple Home; if I changed colors in the Home app, the shift was abrupt. Yet other color-changing bulbs, like the Leedarsen one in my desk lamp, keep their smooth transitions even when connected to my Home app. What’s more, once I had paired the Varmblixt with Apple Home, it unpaired with the Bilresa, and it seems it’s one or the other; I couldn’t pair the remote with the lamp again unless I removed its Matter binding. It’s a small bummer, but a bummer nonetheless.

The $100 question

The Varmblixt probably isn’t for everybody, and I suspect if it’s for you, you already knew it before you read this review. I’m one of those people, for this and for its non-smart predecessor, both of which cost the same $100. I wouldn’t necessarily buy one, but that has more to do with my income and priorities than whether I think it’s worth it as a decorative piece.

That said, if the Varmblixt appeals to you enough and the price tag feels right, I say go for it. The build quality, the colors it produced, and its reliability on my network all pointed toward a light that I wouldn’t actually regret buying. I’d even be tempted to leave it disconnected from my smart home, thanks to the included remote. The big thing to keep in mind here is that the Varmblixt will never replace an existing lamp that was there to actually light a room. This is pure eye candy, meant to vibe with your space, not command it. And it does a great job at that.