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From the wire cutter review:

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Molekule claimed at the time that its “scientifically-proven nanotechnology outperforms HEPA filters in every category of pollutant.”

Our tests proved otherwise. The Molekule turned in the worst performance on particulates of any purifier, of any size, of any price, that we have tested in the seven years that we have been producing this guide.

Not long after we published our findings, that statement was removed from the Molekule website.

Guide author Tim Heffernan asked Molekule CEO Dilip Goswami why. He answered, “the point about ‘in all categories’ is that we see a device that outperforms across all of the categories. Right? So we’re not trying to say that individually, on any particular metric, we would be number one. Right? What we’re saying is, when you look across all the categories, we outperform HEPA. Right? And that’s what we’re attempting to convey with that. And so—it’s fair to say that we needed to re-examine some of the language to make sure that it’s saying what we’re intending to say.”

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This seems like it rises to the level of criminally false?

Well that sucks - so the Theranos of Purifiers, then?

To be honest, as human beings we've evolved over millions of years to be able to handle all of this stuff.

If you are immuno-compromised or otherwise in poor health, then maybe these are worth something, but I highly doubt it. The volume of air they "purify" versus a given room is nothing.

Imagine visualizing the air around you in a room that you are breathing, do you think a small device in the corner with a HEPA filter is going to solve anything?

It's all smoke and mirrors.

Ha! I totally agree with you. I never take any meds. Not even aspirin or ibuprofen. My immune system is very strong - what we should be doing is gut biome transplants - not hepa and hand sanitizer crap.

> To be honest, as human beings we've evolved over millions of years to be able to handle all of this stuff.

I don't think ever before in human history there have been as many particulates in the air as they are now (except when a volcano erupted, until the ash settled).

Additionally, "handling all this stuff" doesn't come for free: I don't have them on hand, but in the previous HN discussions about pollution there have been several papers linked on the effects of pollution on cognitive ability and health in general.

Since you are comparing the amount of particulates in the air to a volcanic eruption ...

How is your HEPA filter in the corner going to handle that? Not well, at all.

I like how I'm being down-voted for this but nobody has yet proven me wrong in terms of scientific numbers regarding air volumes and particulates.

I have a comment from someone saying they were saved from brush fire smoke, yet no indication they'd have been harmed without the air purifier.

This is exactly what the article is talking about, wanting to believe in something that is scientifically unproven.

It is nobody's job to prove you wrong or right – it is a discussion, everybody is free to act as they please within the bounds of the law.

Based on the tone of your remarks it doesn't appear to me that you desire a discussion, rather a confrontation, so I will refrain from spending more time on this matter.

You are free to choose what you believe :)

> Based on the tone of your remarks it doesn't appear to me that you desire a discussion

Untrue, I actually own this device.

Your argument is incredibly naive.

As an Aussie an air purifier saved me from the bushfire smoke and the subsequent dust that was relentless for months. I tried for about a week without one, and nearly ended in hospital multiple times. The air purifier made a safe little haven that was the only place I could breathe without discomfort. After 1.5 months I needed to change the filter as it began to spew out dust and smoke because it was all clogged up. (It was supposed to last 12 months in average conditions)

On the worst days when you couldn't see more than short distances, and the filter was running flat out, I found that a ceiling fan helped circulate the air so that 2 rooms (about 25 sqm) were regularly filtered and clean.

The thing that’s always fascinated me about fantasies of using lie detectors to protect consumers or citizens from liars is that the most convincing liars have lied to themselves first.

They fully believe their own bullshit. By any objective measure they aren’t lying. They’re dogmatic and steadfastly wrong. You know, idiots.

What I find interesting about InstaAds is that whatever product you find advertised is likely garbage... whether it is or isn’t you can find it (at the same or higher quality) for 50% off by searching eBay/Alibaba. It’s almost a joke now. Maybe I should make a meme and post it to the Gram.

My favorite is a fancy "plug strip" that is comprised of a metal junction box and a couple of standard outlets. Sure, the junction box is painted, and the cord is braided, but they're selling it for ~$100.

Shinola?

https://www.shinola.com/power-supply-5-port-usb.html - $185 power supply

Close. Though this one at least looks somewhat custom-manufactured (that's not a standard junction box, nor are those standard outlets). If you have to consider a payment plan for a plug strip, you might want to question your priorities...

I've noticed this as well! I think there are tons of dropship companies that are run by a single person looking to make a quick buck selling rebranded low quality alibaba products. It's endless on my instagram, and I now ignore every single one of them because I know that it's essentially nothing more than spam.

My gf ordered a few things that took AGES to arrive (probably because its shipping straight from China), with 0 customer support (primarily because it's likely run by a single person that couldn't care less about the actual customer who probably subscribes to /r/entrepreneur or /r/juststart). And the final product was as you put it, garbage.

> My gf ordered a few things that took AGES to arrive (probably because its shipping straight from China)

Probably they waited until they had enough orders to fill a container (or a single pallet in someone else's container!) to save money.

Maybe, but often they may be shipping single units from China mail via boat, which take about a 4-6 weeks to arrive (from order placement to arrival at your door.)

I kinda like this. Makes me aware of cool stuff I can source directly at better quality

It’s literally just the comtemporary version of As Seen On TV

Does anyone know the appeal that "As Seen on TV" was supposed to have? A lot of products are being advertised on TV (anything from clothing brands to cars to health insurance) and don't use that fact as a selling point. Why was the fact that it's "seen on TV" used as the only differentiating marker on the product?

I think it's mostly marketing at this point, but for awhile it used to differential products that were previously only available through mail-order. I remember in the 90's there was an "As Seen on TV" store in the Mall of America that only offered such products. See the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_seen_on_TV

There is still one at Oakridge Mall in San Jose. Probably a bunch more in other malls.

https://www.westfield.com/oakridge/stores/all-stores/as-seen...

I imagine it's just to assure the consumer that "this is likely that very product you saw cut the skin off a grape in that infomercial that impressed you."

Having multiple different types touchpoints increases likelihood of conversion.

If you see something on TV, then overhear people talking about it on the street, then see it on FB, you're much more likely to buy it.

Even though each signal is weak and unreliable (and even together they still probably don't mean much) the connection in your brain is more robust.

Not exactly true. Some stuff of the stuff isn’t bad. I have bought Vuori shorts, Marine Layer shirts and a Cotopaxi jacket which I would rank higher than incumbent brands in terms of quality and value. Discover of these products I made though Instagram advertisements.

There’s complete garbage like supplements on there. Just do your research and make sure the brand has a decent refund policy.

This is one of my problems regarding advertising. Turns out for most good products you'd either already have them or would hear about them from word of mouth or by searching online, so they don't need significant advertising anymore. Which means the only ads left go to garbage products.

I work for a municipal government in an area where wildfires hit. During the emergency our city’s fire department gave city hall a molekule air filter to run in the office. Knowing our typical budget I can only assume these were sent to us free by molekule, and I did not notice any improvement in air quality, likely as the technology is more for voc’s than large air particles. Felt super shady to me

I hope they were free, those things are way more expensive than an effective HEPA filter system.

I'm aware which is why I was so suspicious that we had them. I've confirmed yes they were free.

In general, you can't "purify air" without passing all the air in the room through a filter every "n" minutes, and maintaining some sort of barrier for outside air, like a pressurized room so air won't flow in naturally. Any little filter that you can stand in the corner can't do much to clean the air in the room. It may remove some large items like pet dander. A good filter in an HVAC system may do a little bit, but those are mainly to protect the HVAC system from gunk.

This has always been a fertile area for scams, like the air filter that caused the demise of the Sharper Image, once it was established that it caused dangerous ozone levels.

I think you’re taking the term “purify” too literally. These are just filters meant to reduce the concentrations of dust and other particulates. Nobody is expecting to create like, a microprocessor clean room with these.

when Molekule claims they can eliminate airborne viruses they are!

That has nothing to do with what you claimed in the grandparent post and what this person was replying to. You said you can't 'purify' air with a small off the shelf air filter and many people gave you examples to the contrary.

They work for their intended purpose.

I live in a city block with nut trees and a dog. The pollen, dander and pollen+diesel soot from the main road sucks and creates a mess. Running one of these machines in our front room makes a noticeable difference during peak pollen and shedding seasons.

There are plenty of good products out there that are basically a fan with a HEPA filter and an activated charcoal filter. Even at fairly low airflow it does continously filter the entire room air, and can radically reduce particle counts within half an hour.

We have several Winix filters from amazon and they work great! They are HEPA w activated charcoal.

I see unsubstantiated statements like this one so frequently. Please explain how you have determined that "it works great".

Not the OP, but I have bought a Sensirion particulates sensor which I have used to measure the number of particles coming out of two air purifiers. It showed all 0 in the case of one purifier and very low values compared to ambient in the case of the other.

Here's what it shows in my bedroom:

  measured values:
        0.88 pm1.0
        0.93 pm2.5
        0.93 pm4.0
        0.93 pm10.0
        5.87 nc0.5
        6.95 nc1.0
        7.00 nc2.5
        7.00 nc4.5
        7.00 nc10.0
        0.52 typical particle size

Even a box fan and 2 Merv-13 furnace filters glued to it in a V-shape will perform FAR better than 99% of non-HEPA consumer purifiers out there, for a fraction of the price.

yes, a few years ago, i bought a blueair 211+, which has a hepa and activated charcoal filter, and felt a noticeable improvement in my coughing and sneezing right away (and since then).

the 211+ performed the best on wirecutter's own tests, but wasn't the top recommendation for what seemed like arbitrary reasons. you change the filter twice a year for about $100 in yearly costs.

i hvae some air leakage around doors and windows (old building), but it's not enough to overwhelm the 211+ (as noted by my air quality sensor). in fact, i'm ok with some external air exchange, because CO2 levels can otherwise get unacceptably high overnight.

they do explain quite well why they picked what they did, and the blueair 211+ is their upgrade pick for bigger rooms. at least they publish their test methodology and results, so you you can make up your own mind based on the data.

good to hear it's made such a difference for you. i've never considered getting an air purifier, but living in a city, maybe i should.

sorry, i should have added that the review snub was a few years ago when i was researching my purchase options. but yes, they have since added the 211+ as an "also great" recommendation.

i think the main (dubious) issue before was that they doubted the longevity of the high air purification levels they saw and so didn't want to give it a recommendation at the time.

> because CO2 levels can otherwise get unacceptably high overnight

I got a CO2 sensor recently, and I'm surprised how much of a difference small changes can make. One of my rooms was hitting 1600-1800ppm overnight (which as I understand it is not a problem per se but not great) with the door open about 2in/5cm - leaving the internal door open an extra 6in/15cm or so means it rarely goes above about 700ppm (generally hovers around 600).

I'm also surprised at how quickly it'll go up - that same room will go from 800ppm to 1600ppm with the door shut in well under an hour.

Sure! You can filter large particles out of the air with a fan and a few square feet of filter in a closed room. But Molekule said it "purified" air -- including viruses -- and hinted that it destroyed them instead of merely capturing them.

You can filter very small particles out of the air with the right kind of filter[0], and you can sterilize the air by hitting it with UV light.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HEPA [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet_germicidal_irradia...

FYI, from that page:

> "Sterilization" is often misquoted as being achievable. While it is theoretically possible in a controlled environment, it is very difficult to prove and the term "disinfection" is generally used by companies offering this service as to avoid legal reprimand. Specialist companies will often advertise a certain log reduction, e.g., 6-log reduction or 99.9999% effective, instead of sterilization.

I've found that a ceiling fan can also assist in making sure there's good air flow and that the room's getting proper filtering.

> Any little filter that you can stand in the corner can't do much to clean the air in the room. It may remove some large items like pet dander.

A consumer-grade HEPA air purifier (DIY or < $200 on Amazon) against a wall in your bedroom will commonly cut PM 2.5 concentrations by 10x in a few hours if you keep your windows and doors closed.

Source: I own a PM 2.5 counter and have operated air purifiers in China smog and California wildfires. There's also plenty of evidence out there.

Once Again the FTC is proving to be useless in the one area where there should be actually providing consumer protections

Truth in Advertisement.

It is takes a Corrupt organization like the BBB is "expose" this bad company (meaning they simply did not pay the BBB enough money) then really the "core" of the problem is not with Molekule at all, but with a system that allows companies like Molekule to exist with little to no liability.

There should be a way to actually economically harm these companies that make these false claims, but instead it is up to the FTC to "regulate" their advertisements and clearly they (the FTC) do not actually do anything

>Molekule air filters as superior technology based on nothing more than having seen their Instagram ads.

Reminds me of an overpriced tech company that claim security but continuously gets their devices hacked.

> Molekule air filters as superior technology based on nothing more than having seen their Instagram ads.

Is this any different than people buying any luxury product based on marketing? Look at any designer clothing item. It's all based on (close to 100%) what people feel as a result of marketing and branding. The actual product sure is sometimes higher quality and better but not to the extent that it costs.

Take a women's pocketbook for $5000 (Gucci). It's a pocketbook. Woman buys it because of marketing and image. Same here I say (Tesla is another example and note that Bill Gates still buys Porsche because that was the car in the era he was raised in).

Their marketing claims are complete lies about the effectiveness of their product for the purpose of filtering air. People shopping for air purifiers/filters are often enough doing so because they have health problems such as allergies. Not because they want a buzzing cylinder to sit in the middle of their room as some piece of art.

Not the same thing. People buying luxury clothing or accessories are basically buying into the fashion and/or status symbol. Whereas people buying high end air filters are probably expecting functionally better air filters.

> Take a women's pocketbook for $5000 (Gucci). It's a pocketbook. Woman buys it because of marketing and image.

OK, but if the $5,000 pocketbook secretly incinerated anything you put in it, you'd probably get some frustrated customers.

A Gucci pocketbook may be overpriced, but you're at least getting something that works.

> pocketbook [that] secretly incinerate[s] anything you put in it

is it weird that i kind of want to build this?

No. It would be a great art project!

If someone didn't want to build it, I would wonder what website I had accidentally wandered onto that looked vaguely like HN.

Sounds like a great Bond gadget.

The actual product sure is sometimes higher quality and better but not to the extent that it costs.

In many cases, people pay the extra because, yes, it's only fifty percent better and costs ten times as much, but there are no products that are fifty percent better and only cost fifty percent more. If you want fifty percent better, you will have to pay ten times as much. If you can afford it and you don't want the lesser quality product, this is realistically your only option.

Price often doesn't scale linearly. Neither do, say, academic grades. The difference between an A and a B is often more work than the difference between a B and a C.

Sounds like a good business opportunity. In general many brands are involved multiple price point markets. Eg: a liqour company sells a high quality expensive bottle and also remarkets under a different name to say Costco for example. Sometimes it's a very similar product, sometimes they don't want to associate thier name with a worse product though they are owned by the same company

And sometimes it may very well be the same product. Expensive alcohol, clothes, handbags, etc. are very often bought as status symbols - i.e. as evidence you can afford to burn all that money on what's at best an incremental improvement over the mid tier.

Still, that's something entirely different than straight up lying about the objective qualities of your product. Especially medically-relevant ones.

In all seriousness, for that coronavirus mention, I'd like to see someone jailed.

I don't really approve of that. I know it goes on, but I'm not giving my seal of approval to that.

It's just a pet peeve of mine that dressing well is often mocked as frivolous. It often has a gendered component to it, like women are silly creatures.

I knew a professional couple that both worked at the same place in different departments. She talked about going shopping and both of them spending hundreds of dollars on office clothes over the weekend.

The following Monday, she got teased at work for wearing a new outfit. No one said one word to her husband about his new office attire, though he had spent at least as much as her.

My annoyance about how socially acceptable it is to act like nice clothes are merely stupid status symbols is in no way intended to justify deceptive marketing, especially for medical stuff.

The difference is that Gucci doesn't claim that their pocketbooks will protect you from Coronavirus.

People paying for a Gucci know what they're getting: a pocketbook that conveys a particular fashion, status, and personal brand. People buying Molekule air filters don't know what they're getting.

If Mlekule air filters could be picked up at $5 at your local 7-11, this would still be predatory false advertising. The price doesn't matter.

Designer clothing and pocketbooks still succeed at being clothing and pocketbooks respectively. It sounds like this air filter doesn't actually achieve the goal of being an air filter. (Also the entire point of designer clothing is to look pretty, and everyone accepts that so it seems like a poor example).