SHOPPING – Contains affiliated content. Products featured in this Shopping Finder article are selected by our shopping writers. If you make a purchase using links on this page, Dailymail.co.uk will earn an affiliate commission. Click here for more information.
Mirror, mirror on the wall, give me defined abs, strong calves and glutes you could crack an egg on. Yes, I am talking to a 5ft-tall mirror in my living room and, no, I haven’t lost my mind – I’m about to embark on a session with Kirsty, my new personal trainer.
Kirsty, however, is a hologram that lives inside my Magic AI Fitness Smart Mirror – one of an emerging breed – which was delivered in a huge cardboard box by two men, even though it only weighs 19kg.
Once shuffled into place, turned on and connected to the wifi, the mirror lights up like a giant iPhone. Set-up involves a series of questions to personalise workout sessions to my needs (Do I want to lose weight, gain muscle or tone up? Umm, all three, please). Next, after entering my height, weight and fitness level on the touchscreen, classes tailored to my goals flash up. There are more than 100 pre-recorded videos, with scary names including ‘Shred Fury: Full Body’ and ‘Iron Abs: Core’.
I pick an intermediate 20-minute upper-body workout. It requires weights and, luckily, I can use my husband’s, because Magic AI’s dumbbell and bench set costs £799 on top of the mirror’s hefty £1,399 price tag (currently reduced to £599 and £999 respectively.
A model demonstrates its touchscreen workout menu
The exercises are nothing mind-blowing – tricep extensions, push-ups and so on – but since I struggle to come up with my own workout plans, it’s nice to be simply told what to do.
The tracking aspect is clever, too: the mirror’s camera, together with AI technology, tracks your form and counts your reps, giving feedback as you work out, just as a personal trainer would.
Some famous faces pop up in the workout options – Strictly Come Dancing professional Katya Jones has a 25-minute advanced jive class that is good fun, although mercifully the mirror doesn’t track dance moves or I’d be getting straight zeros. I’d never prance about like this in a class full of people, but at home I can jive around like a buffoon without anyone bearing witness.
Indeed, for some people, the whole point of exercising at home is to get away from others. New research from Liverpool John Moores University reveals that many women find going to gyms uncomfortable because they are ‘dominated by conventional masculine norms’. Women also worry about being too fat or ‘wobbly’ for the fitness aesthetic. The Instagram-ification of the gym only adds to its turn-offs. I have seen an influencer hog a machine while she filmed herself working out from various angles, utterly oblivious to other gym users.
Convenience is a further selling point of at-home workout kit such as the mirror. For me, a working mother of two, squeezing in trips to the gym is tricky. Magic AI customers, a spokesperson tells me, are mainly aged 30 to 60 and the majority are women – this is partly, I suspect, because we’re the ones who can’t just disappear to the gym, leaving dependants behind at home.
The fitness-mirror market, which is predicted to rise 25 per cent by 2032, was kickstarted by the pandemic, as sales of home workout equipment suddenly soared. Magic AI was launched in 2021 by East London-born tech whiz Varun Bhanot, who says the brand now sells £2.4 million worth of mirrors per month across 30 countries.
With Office for National Statistics data showing that 41 per cent of people now work from home either completely or partially, there’s still demand for gear to help us stay fit within our own four walls. Personally, I’m not sure the mirror can persuade me to do the same – not least because, unlike a scheduled class, it’s easy to put it off (perhaps the mirror needs a function that shouts at you if you’re not in front of it by 7am).
The workouts also require more floor space than a family of four living in a small flat can handle. For me to be far enough away from the mirror for its trackers to see my whole body, I had to put it in the living room, which meant exercising among the ephemera of two kids under five. Ever backward-lunged on to a piece of Lego wearing only socks? Would not recommend.
Personally, I find working out with just my reflection lonely. As a CrossFit and reformer pilates devotee, I miss the camaraderie of in-person classes – and there’s no amount of clever tech that can replicate escaping the chaos of home for an hour.
The home fitness Mirror offering hyper-personalised, on-demand training. Powered by ReflectAI®, enjoy real-time rep counting, form correction, and weight guidance—all from the comfort of your home. It's like having a personal trainer and gym in one sleek Mirror.
Visit magic.fit for more details