I’m going to be honest from the start: No, you probably don’t need a $600 scale in your bathroom if you are just doing occasional weigh-ins. Hell, I don’t even know that elite athletes need to make this kind of extreme outlay even if they need to periodically check on how their training is going.
But I’m going to make the case for the Withings BodyScan 2 anyway. After spending several months with the device, the scale and its ecosystem have forced me to dig deeper into my health than ever before. At this point, I’m not sure I could go back to an older-model scale—even a very smart one like the original Withings Body Smart, which I used for years.
Photograph: Christopher Null
Getting a Handle on Health
There’s not much to distinguish the BodyScan 2 hardware from other smart scales aside from its handlebars, an indication that this device belongs to the now-burgeoning full-body scanner or body composition scale category. The device is, however, sleeker than most of its competition, featuring a svelte handle that somehow finds room for a small color LCD screen without the need for any extra bulk. All of your body metrics are showcased on this screen in real time, as they’re being measured, alongside any quick tips from Withings about how to get the best reading each time you hop on.
The unit offers two types of weigh-ins. Daily scans take about 30 seconds and include weight, an estimate of muscle and fat percentage (whole body and segmented across torso, arms, legs, and viscera), an estimate of basal metabolic rate, vascular age, and pulse wave velocity—though only a portion of these measurements are displayed live on the display.