• The90 Gem necklace measures UV rays in your surroundings
• It then gives personalized advice on how to stay safe
• The high-tech device is styled as a pendant necklace

It often doesn’t take a lot to burn your skin if you’re out in the sun, and even just a few minutes of exposure can do damage if you’re not properly protected. Instead of guessing the best course of action, a new wearable device from The90 could help you know exactly what to do.

Dubbed the Gem, the product rather grandly describes itself as “The first personal sun intelligence system” that helps you “protect your skin's future in real time.” Despite that, it looks like a simple pendant at first glance. Worn around your neck, it could easily be mistaken for a piece of jewelry to the untrained eye. But there’s a lot more to it than that.

The main pendant is actually an ultraviolet (UV) light sensor that can measure the levels of both UVA (ageing) and UVB (burning) that you’re subject to. It combines this with your personalized skin profile, which covers your skin type, current clothing, and whether you’ve already applied sunscreen.

Once the device has all of that, it can give you advice on when it’s time to apply more sunscreen, cover up with extra clothes, or get under shade and out of the sun entirely. It does this through the company’s companion app, which is available for free.

Actionable insights

Plenty of weather apps provide data on UV rays in your local area, but the issue is they’re always going to be relatively inaccurate since they cover broad areas. A device like the Gem, on the other hand, can measure UV levels in your direct vicinity, giving you potentially more accurate information.

And because it takes variable factors into account — such as your clothing and skin type — it might be able to give you more valuable and actionable insights than something that just gives out blanket advice.

Still, it has a couple of limitations. It only comes in one style, for one thing, and that might not appeal to everyone. When you have a device that doubles up as both a health tracker and a wearable necklace, it could be a risk to only offer one appearance.

As well as that, the Gem is priced at $299, which makes it a fairly expensive — and therefore fairly niche — device. That’s perhaps reflected by its positioning as a piece of high-tech jewelry rather than a simple UV tracker. Still, it could price more people out than a simpler product would.

Despite all that, though, the Gem has promise. Founded by a Fitbit/Google veteran and with plenty of interesting ideas, it could certainly be one to watch.

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Alex Blake has been fooling around with computers since the early 1990s, and since that time he's learned a thing or two about tech. No more than two things, though. That's all his brain can hold. As well as TechRadar, Alex writes for iMore, Digital Trends and Creative Bloq, among others. He was previously commissioning editor at MacFormat magazine. That means he mostly covers the world of Apple and its latest products, but also Windows, computer peripherals, mobile apps, and much more beyond. When not writing, you can find him hiking the English countryside and gaming on his PC.