17 gifts for people who don’t drink enough water
How much water do you drink a day, really? What about your closest pal, or your family? Be honest. If it’s not the two litres recommended, then we’ve got work to do.
We all know someone (or are someone) who refuses to reach their daily H2O quota, so perhaps said rebel just needs a little sprucing up of their water receptacle. Plus, with an estimated 8 million tonnes of plastic waste entering the global marine environment each year, having your own bottle is no longer a want, it’s a planetary need.
Here’s a bunch of covetable water bottles, carafes, and pitchers to gift to those who need a little more water in their lives. They’ll quench everyone’s thirst, and give the planet a little break too.
Bottles
Image: MEMOBOTTLE
If you’re unlikely to take a water bottle with you because its very roundness doesn’t quite fit in your bag, you need a memobottle. Designed by Australian duo Jesse Leeworthy and Jonathan Byrt, these Melbourne-made bottles are based on paper sizes — A5, A6, and the tiny, tiny A7.
They fit perfectly in the back of a plane seat, inside the document compartment of your backpack or sit flat on your desk. You can wrap them in leather cases, or customise them with the different coloured lid packs. Plus, every memobottle sold supports not-for-profit water.org, providing one person with two months' access to clean water.
Price: Up to $36
Frank Green, a Melbourne-founded company specialising in reusable coffee SmartCups, also makes a water bottle that you can can pay for things with. The 25-ounce / 740-mililitre SmartBottle works with an app to keep your hydration on track, set up reminders and goals, and learn how sustainable your reusable bottle is with a live record of plastic bottles saved from landfill.
If you pick one of the SmartBottles from the company’s “New Generation,” each bottle is fitted with Visa payWave technology, so you can literally pay for things with your water bottle — perhaps you’re using your bottle for a coffee that day.
Price: $33
If it’s Dutch ingenuity you’re after, Dopper’s a solid bet. These versatile, upside-down bottles were designed by Delft University of Technology alumnus Rinke van Remortel and handpicked by Dopper founder Merijin Everaarts as the winner of his design competition to find “the perfect reusable bottle for drinking water.”
Each 500 ml Dopper bottle is double-wall insulated, so can keep your drink hot for nine hours and cold for 24 hours, and has three parts to it, including a cup — a cup! Or wine glass, if you will, but that’s not what we’re here for. Dopper’s also a social enterprise, with 5 percent of the sale from your bottle going to support clean water projects around the globe.
Price: $15–$40
Camelbak All Clear UV Purifier
Want to zap your tap water with UV rays to some of the nasties? Camelbak’s All Clear UV Purifier is quite the intense 25-ounce water bottle, able to turn either tap or natural stream water into drinking water in a minute.
In 60 seconds, you can let the bottle’s purification system utilise UV technology to neutralize microbiological contaminants and clean that water up. There’s an LCD screen on the side, which verifies whether the treatment was successful. And it’s not cheap at $147.
Price: $147
German-designed and equipped with its own app, the Dual Bottle is ideal for those who plain forget to drink water every day. It’s a sizeable bottle at 2.2 litres, and has an accompanying app that lets you track your water consumption, set goals, and see trends over time. Plus, it’ll send notifications to remind you to drink up. Importantly, you have to physically let the app know you’ve had a drink of water — it won’t monitor it for you from the bottle. Dual is available on Kickstarter for now, and bottles start from $29.
Price: From $29
You would have seen a S’Well bottle around, they’re pretty commonplace nowadays. But back in 2010, the New York-based company started by Sarah Kauss was trying to stop people buying disposable plastic bottles by making a fashionable alternative. Their Original insulated bottle keeps water cold for up to 24 hours, hot for up to 12. Plus, they’re a partner of UNICEF USA.
Nowadays, there are plenty of similar products like the S’Well bottle made by other companies — and far be it from us to resolve the ‘who did it first’ argument. I use an insulated 500 ml bottle by Australian company The Seek Society that keeps water (or wine) cold for up to 24 hours. Hiking wine! I mean, water. Desk wine! I mean, water.
Price: $25–$45
This one’s for either hardcore outdoorsy types or beer lovers, or both! Klean Kanteen’s stainless steel growlers are pretty slick, and some are insulated — the 64-ounce keeps drinks cold up to 40 hours and iced up to 120 hours. Seriously, that's five days.
While they’re mainly targeting craft beer lovers who take their own growler to breweries (those pressure-tested Swing Lok Caps are made to retain carbonation), Klean Kanteen also make insulated water bottles. Particularly fetching and more conducive to water drinking is the Insulated Reflect bottle made from sustainably harvested bamboo and stainless steel.
Price: $18.95–$59.95
Live Infinitely Infuser Water Bottle
Find water completely boring? Spice it up a little with your favourite fruits. Florida company Live Infinitely built their water bottle range around their signature infuser, designed so you can put some strawberries, mint, orange, cucumber, whatever you like in your bottle and actually enjoy your H2O.
The bottle is BPA-free and can also be used for tea. Plus, they make vacuum insulated versions, if you want to keep your concoction cold for 12 hours. Look, if nothing else, it’ll trick you into drinking fruit-flavored water instead of soda.
Price: $14.90
Want to track exactly how much water you drink without even trying? The H2OPal Smart Bottle is another app-based bottle, but this one does all the work for you, automatically tracking how much you’re drinking and syncing data with your smartphone, Apple Watch, FitBit, and even Alexa — the iOS app is up and running, with Android in beta mode. You can pick from black and blue or pink and yellow, and it’s not cheap at $99.
If you’re looking for a more minimalist design, the more elegant Hydrate Spark has a similar function, glowing when you need to take a drink and syncing data with your smartphone.
Price: $99
Founded in 2009 in Bend, Oregon, Hydroflask specialises in insulated bottles for different types of beverages, including beer and wine. But we’re here for the H2O, best kept cold in the company’s TempShield vacuum insulated stainless steel bottles.
These can stay cold up to 24 hours and hot up to 12 hours, come in standard or wide mouth ( for those ice-cube lovers among us), and you can pick from a range of super bright matte colours. Every single one of their bottles also comes with a lifetime warranty – not bad.
Price: $29.95–$39.95
Want filtered water on the go? These BRITA fill&go bottles will deliver clean, filtered H2O straight to your mouth. The fill&go bottles come in “Vital” or “Active” styles, and while more sporty folks might be into the latter, the glass minimalism of the former is my type of desk bottle.
These bottles are especially good for travelling in locations where tap water isn’t recommended for drinking. BRITA’s built-in filters reduce the taste of chlorine, although doesn’t remove it entirely.
Price: $18–$22
Carafes
Sebastian Bergne's Drop carafe
If you’re after a water receptacle you can truly be smug about, designer Sebastian Bergne’s Drop carafe is it. Launched for the 2016 London Design Festival, the Drop is an everyday jug that resembles a droplet of water. It’s just so pretty, but also practical.
Handmade with heat resistant borosilicate glass, the Drop can hold a litre of ice cold water or hot tea, whichever you’re keen on. The acrylic lid functions as a neat coaster too. It’s not cheap at $115, but makes one hell of a present if you’re looking to truly impress.
Price: $115
San Francisco-based company Soma made a splash on Kickstarter in 2013 with their elegant alternative to other water filters on the market. They were peddling a minimalist glass carafe with a totally compostable water filter, which has become the cornerstone of their range.
Soma's glass carafe holds 48-ounce (6 cups) of filtered water, and the company claims the biodegradable filter sorts out zinc, copper, and mercury. You just fill the carafe from your tap, through the filter, and put it in the fridge.
Price: From $49
Lotte de Raadt’s tap water carafe
Dutch designer Lotte de Raadt has dreamt up one of the most striking water receptacles you’re likely to find. It’s a ceramic terracotta water carafe that was debuted at Dutch Design Week 2017 and was designed to promote the consumption of perfectly clean tap water in the Netherlands — you can see the little tap reference with the lid design.
De Raadt makes three different variations in her ceramics workshop in Eindhoven, each increasing in price. She also makes stunning glass versions of the carafes, if you’re not into the terracotta, which naturally leaks a little — a heads up if it’s going to sit on a fancy coffee table.
Price: $91–$260
Smart devices
Image: lifestraw
Want to drink straight from a stream in the wilderness? Keen adventurers will get a kick out of the LifeStraw, which allows you to sip clean drinking water from natural water sources — a particularly handy tool in an emergency situation.
LifeStraw products wield a hollow fiber membrane, which features microscopic pores that trap contaminants — bacteria and parasites are bigger than the pores in the filter, but water isn’t. The LifeStraw microfiltration membrane removes almost all bacteria and parasites from the water — that includes dreaded salmonella and E. coli. If you pick one with two-stage filtration, a cheeky carbon capsule is said to absorb chemicals like chlorine and pesticides, too.
Price: From $19.95
Already have a reusable bottle and want to make it smarter? Ulla is a small device that works with bottles of any size and shape to remind you to stay hydrated. If you forget to drink water, smart detection sensors on the device will blink to remind you at least once every 60 minutes.
If you’re a more serious type, there are plain colour designs, but if you’re looking for something that’ll really convince you that drinking water is enjoyable dammit, there are some fun options with animals or empowering messages. Try the “Warrior” one if it’s an emergency.
Price: $28
Yep, a beer hat. If you’re looking to truly hydrate someone, pop two bottles of water in a beer hat and get ‘em sipping. They need it. You can pick one up from eBay from around $10-$15, and while it may not get the message across in the way you’d hope, it’s a solid, cheap try.
Price: $10-$15
Best of luck trying to hydrate yourself, your friend, your cousin, and anyone else you know who isn't drinking enough water. Honestly, that's probably everyone you know.
WATCH: You can literally drink out of a stream with this water filter
