My Baby's Air Purifier Ended Up Changing My Life

Photo: Jennifer Camp Forbes

Pictured with: Threshold accent chair (similar option), Jellycat Octopus, and Petit Pehr basket.

Since college I have suffered from terrible year-round allergies. They flare up pretty bad if I pet or cuddle my pets, but they become unbearable just hours after dusting or cleaning my home. To help combat this, while I’m cleaning and for hours afterwards, I wear a mask that covers my nose and mouth. The mask really helps, but it’s incredibly uncomfortable to breath through and wear for such a long time.

When I got pregnant, I wondered if one day our baby would have her allergies flare up like mine did. With that in mind, my husband and I added an air purifier to our must-have baby gear list and started to research all of our options. This was overwhelming to say the least, but as luck would have it, I was on Pinterest one day and spotted an ad for the Molekule. I didn’t know it was an air purifier at first, but the stylish design caught my eye. I will admit that I figured it wouldn’t be up to snuff—in my experience most aesthetically pleasing gadgets tend to not work that great. It was too sleek to ignore, so I decided to read up on it.

I came to find that the Molekule had been named one of Time Magazine’s best inventions 2017 as well as Popular Science’s Greatest Home Innovations of the Year. They claimed to have “scientifically-proven nanotechnology” that has been shown to outperform “HEPA filters in every category of pollutant from well-known allergens like dust, pollen, and pet dander to microscopic pollutants like mold, viruses, bacteria, and gaseous chemicals." And with that, I decided to reach out to their team and see if they’d be willing to send me a unit to review, and they kindly agreed.

When the air purifier arrived we set it up in our bedroom since the baby would be sleeping in there for the first year. This gave us an opportunity to really test out the unit and see how well it worked for my allergies before baby arrived. After just a week, I began noticing a huge difference when I woke in the morning. My itchy throat, from post-nasal drip, and stuffy nose were nearly gone, and I could breath more clearly than usual. By the end of the month, I woke up without any of my usual symptoms. When I put it on Boost mode, I could finally clean and dust the room without a mask. That experience is what really showed me the power of this air purifier. Later in the day, I expected a full-blown allergy attack, but other than some sneezing and some barely itchy eyes, I was okay. It was transformative.

I had the opportunity to jump on a call with Jaya Rao, one of the co-founders of Molekule, who also happened to be pregnant with her first child (yay!). When I asked about the company’s story, she told me her brother had severe asthma as a baby and nothing seemed to help him improve his breathing. This led their father, the head of the Clean Energy Research Center at the University of South Florida, to create a new kind of air purifier. After 20 years of development, the Molekule was perfected. It doesn’t just filter air and collect impurities the way traditional HEPA filters do, it actually uses their patented PECO technology to destroy the impurities at a molecular level.

All in all, we are very happy with the Molekule air purifier. It’s helped tremendously with my allergies and our daughter Delphine hasn’t shown any any signs thus far. It’s also a beautiful piece that serves as decor in any room—We’ve had many visitors comment on the design when meeting the baby. The only drawback is the price. It’s $800, plus a little over $100 a year for new filters, which can be outside of many people’s budget. What I will say is that I believe it is worth every penny for the relief it provides to people that suffer from breathing difficulties. If you consider how much you spend on allergy meds like Claritin, Benadryl and Flonase, this really ends up saving you money in the long run. That aside, having the piece of mind that your baby is breathing clean air at home is priceless.

Disclosure: The Molekule was gifted to our family. The opinions, as always, are my own.