My Wife Took the Renpho Eye Massager – Now I Can’t Get It Back
As a traveling tech reporter, I often find myself in hotel rooms after 16-hour demanding days, logging 20,000 or more steps on a tradeshow floor. To make a long story short, it’s pretty, well, stressful. To that end, Renpho reached out with an offer for a care package to help ease the strain at CES this year. Part of that package included the Renpho Eyeris 1 eye massager – as in, it massages your eyes. Well, I’ll try anything once, so it arrived.
To make a long story short, it wasn’t really for me. I didn’t find it particularly relaxing or comforting, but then my stress tends to live in my back and shoulders, not my eyes and head. So, when I got home from CES, I asked my wife, who suffers from chronic migraines, if she wanted to give it a try.
I haven’t seen it since.
This device has become an absolute godsend for the women (wife and teenage daughter) in my life, and that’s a good enough endorsement for me. But first, here’s what the device actually is and how it works
The Renpho Eyeris eye massager looks like a slim VR headset. There’s a vegan leather inside cover that goes over your eyes, which is as soft and supple as the real thing, and a hard plastic shell on the outside. The shell folds vertically down the middle for easier storage – I say “easier,” because I’m not entirely sure it’s actually much smaller folded than it is when open, but I digress. When folded, a USB-C charging port is revealed.
On the right-hand side (while wearing the device), there are three buttons: Power, pressure, and music. The power button is the largest of the three and, therefore, the easiest to identify, as it should be. The other two are the same size, so you need to remember which is which. One controls the pressure, and the other controls heat. The music button plays built-in relaxation music. Neither my wife nor daughter uses that – my wife listens to podcasts.
You can pair the massager with your phone as an audio device. The sound quality is…fine…but you’d be better off with a pair of earbuds. There’s also an app, but the base model doesn’t connect to it, which is weird. For $20 more, you can get the “smart” version, which connects to an app. That seems like an odd place to put a paywall, so that’s not awesome. That didn’t deter my wife or my daughter; they still love it.
When you turn on the device, it automatically kicks into the first routine, which involves heat and pressure. There’s also vibration, and single taps on the power button that cycle through the various combinations. There are six options: eye massaging, vibration, heat, or any combination of these. My wife’s favorite is heat and pressure. She occasionally uses vibration, but for her headaches, it often doesn’t help. Speaking of which, the massager runs for 15 minutes at a time.
The headset applies pressure to the eyes with small airbags inflating and deflating beneath the vegan leather interior. You can adjust the pressure using the aforementioned button, but you can’t alter the timing of the pressure. Both my wife and my sister-in-law (who bought one after trying ours) would like the ability to adjust how long the pressure lasts before deflating.
The Renpho Eyeris 1 eye massager isn’t for me, but that’s a personal thing. Judging by the women in my life, it’s a winner. My wife and daughter don’t use it daily, but a few times per week. We typically need to charge the 1,500 mAh battery about once a week, without music playback, so your mileage may vary. It charges with USB-C, so the charging cables for your other devices should work here – one less thing to pack. If you have a person in your life who suffers from headaches or generally carries stress in their head, this is a good solution.. It’s currently on sale for $59.99, and that seems to be a perma-sale on Amazon, so the price is not too bad either. How much would you pay for headache relief?
[Image credit: Adam Doud/Techlicious]
