Ikea’s best-selling donut lamp is getting a colorful upgrade

One of Ikea’s most popular lamps of the past several years—nicknamed the “donut lamp”—is about to get a smart, colorful upgrade.

The original donut lamp debuted back in 2023 as part of Ikea’s 20-piece Varmblixt collection with the Rotterdam-based designer Sabine Marcelis. With its glossy orange glass and soft, retro glow, the lamp quickly emerged as a fan favorite: In the three years since its debut, Ikea says one donut lamp has sold every five minutes in the U.S. It’s the company’s best-selling lamp, both in the U.S. and worldwide.

Given the lamp’s popularity, Ikea has teamed up with Marcelis for a new version, this time featuring a smart function that allows it to cycle through a curated palette of colors. The new donut lamp will be available for $99.99 starting in April, alongside a $149.99 color-changing version of a pendant lamp that also debuted as part of the original Varmblixt collection.

The updated lamps come as Ikea is investing more into its smart products with a new range of easy-to-use bulbs, sensors, and smart plugs that debuted in November. Both the donut lamp and the pendant lamp are compatible with Ikea’s smart home system hub, Dirigera, as well as Matter, the smart home technical standard that undergirds the rest of the company’s smart home tech. This new integration signals that as smart systems become more central to Ikea’s product approach, we might see the company begin to integrate new functions into more of its most popular items.

How the donut became Ikea’s most popular lamp

There’s a pretty good chance that you’ve stumbled across Ikea’s donut lamp on your feeds. Since 2023, the lamp has gone viral multiple times among design enthusiasts. It’s become so ubiquitous that Marcelis says she’s often walked past houses and seen it glowing through the windows.

“It was pretty wild how viral it went,” she says. “When designing Varmblixt, I wanted to create timeless pieces that could be interpreted in many ways. The fact that the lamp can be both wall mounted and used as a table lamp already makes it very versatile. It’s a lamp that even if you have nothing else in a room, it works.”

On TikTok and Instagram Reels, the donut lamp has generated an entire subgenre of videos dedicated to donut lamp “hacks” that use colorful electrical tape pasted over the interior bulb to darken the hue of the lamp. But with the smart donut lamp, Ikea fans will no longer need to risk overheating tape to curate their own lighting vibe. 

The donut lamp gets a colorful facelift

To make the smart donut lamp compatible with a range of colors, Marcelis traded the original’s glossy orange surface for a matte white exterior that lets the interior bulb’s colors shine through.

“It’s soft in texture and void of color, making the internal light source and colors it creates inside the volume glow in a really soft, diffused manner on the shell,” Marcelis says.

Users can choose to connect the lamp to the Dirigera hub, which allows them to access a full color spectrum of more than 40 hues, adjust light intensity, and fiddle with dimming settings. The lamp’s default setting, however, is controlled by a remote featuring 12 colors selected by Marcelis specifically for the collection. The sequence moves through different temperatures of white light, into glowing amber and red, followed by soft pink, cool lavender, turquoise, yellow, and back to white.

“I wanted the presets that you can vary between with the remote to be 12 specific atmospheres that range from alert work-mode light to party mode and all the way to cozy, calm mode,” Marcelis says. “I’ve had an early prototype in our guest room for the last six months, and this one pretty small lamp can change the hue of the whole room.”

View the full article