The air fryer you’ll actually want to have on your worktop

Today, you’d have pretty good odds of seeing an air fryer in any kitchen. As of 2025, 65 per cent of UK households had an air fryer, twice as many as in 2022. And despite the usual trend of buying a shiny new appliance and hardly ever using it, air fryers have avoided that fate. In 2025, 86 per cent of air fryer owners cooked with their air fryer weekly or more often.

But they are space-sinks on the worktop – another monochrome, nondescript gadget that has a job to do. It appears an air fryer’s appearance (or kitchen appliances more generally, for that matter) has been considered.

SMEG has changed that. The kitchen is the heart of the home and should be treated as one. And the Italian brand makes a statement with nostalgic, colourful appliances designed to be styled together on your worktop. It’s this chic aesthetic that has been carried into its latest launch: an air fryer.

Blending the brand’s signature look with a modern finish, it doesn’t even look like an air fryer. It leans into minimalism with its streamlined silhouette and matte finish, and features distinctive branding alongside an intuitive push-button lid mechanism. The idea is to match it with other pieces in the SMEG small appliance collection.

But with 76 per cent of Brits believing some foods simply taste better when prepared in an air fryer, it needs to be functional and cook to perfection. To counter the common dryness of air-fried food, SMEG has incorporated what it calls Juicy+Crispy mode. Water is drawn from a container, released and circulated around the food as microdrops, which helps to prevent dishes from drying out while cooking. Food is, therefore, crispy on the outside but tender on the inside (good for thick cuts of meat or fish).

The other mode, Crispy, uses hot air circulation to cook food evenly for a crispy exterior and even browning – this is intended for fried foods like chips or breaded foods.

Tapping into a growing trend in the air fryer market, SMEG’s air fryer features a lid made of glass and has an internal light so you can inspect the level of crispiness of, say, your spring rolls, with ease. Gone are the days when the progress of your lunch was a total mystery until you’d opened the air fryer, only to let out the heat and then have to wait longer for it to be ready. And gone are the days of an ugly air fryer on your worktop.