Review: This smart diffuser made my whole house smell like a luxury hotel
The ScentAir Whisper Home diffuser is an expensive but impressive smart gadget that floods your home with hotel-grade fragrance — and there are currently big savings to be had on starter bundles
If you want to fill your house with a luxurious fragrance, there are some cheap ways of doing it, and there are some fairly lavish ways of doing it. I've been exploring the latter for the last few weeks.
Sure, you could spend a few quid on little plug-in devices that radiate essential oils and give off your chosen perfume throughout the day, but if you want to really impress your visitors, there's a gadget for that. It's called the ScentAir Whisper Home Diffuser, and it's a smart electric diffuser. Smart in the sense it looks quite classy, and smart in the sense it can be controlled over WiFi, through an app.
Let's get something out of the way first though, it's £250. And that doesn't include a fragrance cartridge, that's just the electronic diffuser. Cartridges cost £69 each.
However, there are some pretty prestigious fans among the users of the ScentAir kit, including luxury hotels and resorts, so if you do fancy what is perhaps one of the ultimate scent diffusers, you'd be in fine company.
And that's because it works incredibly well. It's called a Whisper Home Diffuser because its internal fan runs incredibly quietly. And its smart features enable you to tune everything from the amount of scent that's being emitted to the ambient lights that surround its pretty frame.
To test it out, I've been running the Pine Forest scent in my house for several weeks, including over the festive period. And, let's just say, it's quite easy to overdo it.
On the first day of running the ScentAir I remember a text message from my wife, who was working from home in another part of the house, telling me she could "taste pine". We turned it down a little and it's been fine after that.
Finding the right location for the device has been quite easy. Even in a non-central location, with the scent turned right down, you quite easily permeate every room and, I'm not exaggerating, the scent is absolutely gorgeous.
ScentAir reckons you can get a month's worth of fragrance from one £69 cartridge, but I'd suggest you might manage a lot more than that, especially if you don't run it all day every day and you keep the intensity low - which I would, honestly, recommend.
And that's quite easy to achieve, because you can set cycles and schedules on the app.
It really is a set-it-and-forget-it appliance. You just sit it in a corner somewhere, on the floor or on a surface, and it'll quietly whirr into life, delicately permeating your indoor space with whatever fragrance you choose. There are 24 options to choose from, and most have dozens of reviews to help you decide.
To load up a fragrance, you just unwrap the surprisingly large plastic cartridge, pop it in the top, and set the fragrance free.
It is pretty overpowering at first, but it does settle down, and this is the point at which you'll find yourself adjusting it to suit the size of your space and the amount of scent you want.
But that's what I love about it, you can have a very subtle whiff of the fragrance, or you can properly ramp it up. Having the house smell like a pine forest over Christmas was absolutely delightful.
Yes, it's expensive and, yes, there are much cheaper ways to make your house smell nice, but do check out the ScentAir website because there are often some very good deals on.
As I write this, there's an offer to save £126 on a starter bundle, which is well worth jumping on, and you can sign up to a newsletter to save even more.