A health tracker designed to keep you moving

At this point, smartwatches are deeply ingrained into our everyday wardrobes. It’s become a staple to leave the house with a tiny wrist-bound computer that promises everything from immediate text notifications to hands-free calls to heightened awareness of vital stats like heart rate.

However, not all smartwatches are created equal, and some models are more advanced than others. Some models are best for light daily use, while other smartwatches are more rugged. Some better suit men’s needs and wrist sizes, while women shop for watches with smaller profiles and more conscientious female health tracking. The Lily 2 is a petite, elegant watch with a strong tracking app to help it meet these needs.

Price, availability, and specs

The Garmin Lily 2 has an MSRP of $250 and is available through many online retailers, including Garmin and Amazon. Scheels and Best Buy also sell Garmin’s newest smartwatch for women. The price may vary based on color selection and face size. Select variations are currently discounted by $50 at Scheels and Amazon.

What’s good about the Garmin Lily 2?

It’s beautifully designed and thoughtfully functional

The Lily 2 is a gorgeous watch. The design impressions on the lens faces are subtle and beautiful without being over-the-top or a visual impediment when looking at the screen. It’s offered in six varieties — all different colors, two silicone bands, two leather bands, two nylon bands — each with a unique lens design.

Combined with a muted, colorless display, the Lily 2 is an excellent smartwatch for women who don’t want their timepiece to be glaringly, obviously, a smartwatch.

The battery life is excellent. Garmin says the Lily 2’s battery lasts five days before a charge is needed; I don’t like to let my smartwatch dip below 20% battery, so I put the Lily 2 on the charger at the end of every fourth day. I tested the watch’s 5 ATM water resistance rating with showering and swimming, and it came out without a hitch.

I came into the Lily 2 testing completely unfamiliar with Garmin’s health and wellness approaches. I had the “close your rings” culture of Apple Watches deeply ingrained in my brain; my friends and I held each other accountable for daily ring-closing to a cult-like degree. (One of us sent a proud picture of closed rings from her hospital bed; another time, the group chat reminded everyone to close their rings, which ended with a friend responding within moments that she would get it done! It was her wedding day.)

It took using the Lily 2 to realize how ingrained I was in this rigid goal-setting. The Apple smartwatch interface lets you change your calorie/step/exercise goals as much as you want, but the numbers remain the same until you manually update them again. On the other hand, the Lily 2 establishes unique goals based on recent sleep, stress, and activity levels (the time frame isn’t indicated, but my goals changed slightly every day).

This auto-goal feature is optional, but it grew on me quickly. Any woman who experiences the different phases of the monthly ebb and flow can surely appreciate the value of a watch that detects your dips in energy and responds appropriately.

Further, the Garmin app is pretty neutral about which information (health vs. strictly fitness and exercise) is prioritized in the home read-out. Sure, you can configure Garmin and Apple’s tracking apps to make fitness-related content more or less prominent. However, not having your daily progress (or lack thereof) on immediate display in vivid rings was refreshing.

One of my favorite features is Garmin’s “Body Battery” statistic, which amalgamates data like your sleep quality, stress levels, and recent activity to assign you an estimated “battery level” out of 100. I found it to be mostly accurate, and I appreciated this feature’s encouragement of rest when my battery was slow and movement when it was high. This makes the Lily 2 an excellent watch for women who want to be more in-tune with their overall health but aren’t seeking to become athletic machines.

With some tweaking to the Garmin Connect app’s home screen, you can choose to see your blood oxygen levels, current menstrual cycle phase, heart rate, stress levels, sleep quality, and body battery. If that information is unimportant or triggering, you can opt out of seeing any exercise, steps, or calorie data on the home screen.

What’s bad about the Garmin Lily 2?

No GPS to track outdoor exercise without a phone

The Lily 2 lacks GPS connectivity, and that’s easily its biggest shortcoming. I prefer the gym over outdoor running, so keeping my phone handy while lifting is not a big deal. However, I am an avid hiker and enjoy daily leisurely walks, and it’s disappointing that I couldn’t rely on the Lily 2 to track my path without the assistance of a smartphone, both from a fitness and safety perspective.

I hope that smartwatches establish a more ubiquitous standard for charging. The Lily 2 uses an odd clip-on charger that you will never in a million years be able to replace if you, for instance, forget the charger for a vacation and only have a hotel lobby store at your disposal. (The Garmin Venu line of smartwatches utilizes a totally different charger, for example.)

The watch’s wake-up button gives a little haptic burst when touched, but a handful of times, it annoyingly took the button two or three times to register my touch and respond. And like any other smartwatch, the Lily 2 utilizes a lift-to-wake feature, keeping the screen dimmed until it registers arm movement. But if your arm is positioned in a way where the Lily 2’s face is dimmed, and you want to tap the face for a quick glimpse at the time, the watch is unresponsive to this.

I learned this while sitting with a sleeping cat draped over my watch arm. Rather than commit the cardinal sin of disturbing the feline, I just wanted to tap the idle watch and read the time, but the Lily 2 didn’t register this at all and refused to wake until I moved my arm — much to the chagrin of my drowsy cat.

Should you buy it?

For casual or indoor workouts

There are better-suited smartwatches for serious female athletes, even under Garmin’s umbrella. The Lily 2 lacks advanced features, such as GPS, constant ECG readings, and a metric indicating how ready you are for a workout. Garmin calls this metric Training Readiness and calculates it using data like your sleep score, stress, recovery time from the last workout, and other training stats.

Garmin offers training readiness and multi-band GPS on one women’s watch, the Forerunner 265S. These athletic-related strengths, combined with other compelling perks missing in the Lily 2 like Garmin Pay, an AMOLED display, and onboard music storage, the $450 Forerunner 265S is what I’d recommend to women with strict fitness-related goals, like marathon training or competitive weightlifting. You can even opt into daily workout suggestions with the Forerunner.

For the same price as the Forerunner, the Venu 3 also supports Garmin Pay, local music storage, and voice controls for calls and texts. However, you’ll miss out on the Training Readiness feature, so the Venu 3S could be a strong choice for women with cardiovascular concerns who want to monitor throughout the day.

If optional constant EKG reading is something you’re looking for, the Garmin Venu 3S is your choice. And, of course, if diving is a part of your workout mix, you’ll want to check out Garmin’s higher-end diving-equipped watches.

Don’t love any of these options, including the Lily 2? There are tons of non-watch fitness tracker options to explore.

So, is the Lily 2 right for anyone? Well, if you, like me, enjoy walks and jogs but find the thought of sucking nutritional goo out of a pouch at mile 8 of a run horrifying, then the Lily 2 could be a great fit for you. If you’re one for simple workouts, like yoga and hiking, and aren’t all that concerned with data like recovery time and cardiac activity, then the Lily 2 could be a great fit for you.

Most importantly, if you want to break out of the “close your rings” psychology and instead use a watch that brings your exercise/caloric/step goals to a level that still challenges you while remaining thoughtfully in tune with your recent activity levels, then the Lily 2 is absolutely a great fit for you.