This Advertising Watchdog Just Rejected Basically All of Molekule’s Air Purifier Claims
2nd March 2020
You may have heard of the Molekule air purifier. It pops up in ads left and right, design-minded businesses such as InterContinental Hotels and the MoMA Design Store have embraced it, and influential media outlets including Wired, Time, Popular Science, Architectural Digest, Town & Country, New York Magazine, and The New York Times’s own T Magazine have sung its praises.1 Those places bought into the company’s claims, but the only two publications to actually test it—Wirecutter and Consumer Reports—found it to be abysmal, or, as we put it in our air purifier guide, “the worst air purifier we’ve ever tested.” Now the company is back in the news making some big promises: Founders say they’re “very confident that this technology will destroy Coronavirus” and that the virus is “a rather simple structure for us to be able to be destroy.” And the company just got $58 million in new funding. So is everyone getting duped by simply taking Molekule’s word for it?
I have a Molekule, and I find these results quite disappointing. I can’t, however, say that they are wrong. My wife and I both have seasonal allergies, which is why I bought it, and at first it seemed to help a great deal. More recently, however, it doesn’t seem to have any beneficial effect.