The rise of portable fans is cute, convenient, and a bit of a bummer

There are pink ones, small and dainty, that fit into the palm of your hand and are charged with a USB port. There are black ones, large enough to blow wind through both your hairline and your collarbones, kept alive by the electric pulses of a Duracell battery. There are paper ones, folded small and powered completely by the manual force of your own hand, that splay out to show off intricate designs or ads for clubs. They're portable fans, and they're everywhere.

Directly under the California sun at VidCon this summer, influencer Naomi Hearts, walking around with a portable fan, told me, "That's all you need." At the Creator Weekend for the 2025 Webby Awards, "demure" icon Jools Lebron never went anywhere without one of her four handheld, battery-powered fans because she "always [has] to have the wind." There are thousands of reviews and recommendations for handheld fans on TikTok: for your car, for a festival, for a cookout.

This isn't just my personal observation from the floor of a variety of admittedly sweaty conventions and the depths of TikTok recommendations — climate change is here, and $10 portable fans are trending. According to market research consulting company Credence Research, the portable fan market is projected to grow from $558.92 million in 2024 to $979.16 million by 2032. According to a different market research consulting company, Business Research Insights, the global personal portable fan market size is "set to expand to $1.06 billion by 2033." A third market research company echoed the others' insights, adding that part of the reason behind personal fans' success is online retail and e-commerce. The trend is clear and, as Mashable shopping reporter Samantha Mangino pointed out, the cause is clear, too: We're experiencing devastating heat waves across the world, with a recent heat dome that reached from Chicago to New York.

We've responded to this by increasing our air conditioning usage inside. According to Columbia Climate School, "Air conditioning is no longer just a luxury, but an imperative for human health, as heat stress is the leading weather-related cause of death." But, as the researchers wrote, "the more we cool, the more planet-warming global greenhouse gas emissions we pump into the atmosphere."

And you can't bring a Frigidaire onto the subway with you. Enter: Personal fans that you can buy from companies like Shein and Amazon, both of which contribute wildly to climate change by producing textile waste, microplastic pollution, and astounding amounts of plastic waste, making the problem you're trying to solve even worse. Capitalism both produces the crisis — rising global temperatures — and then commodifies the coping mechanisms — portable fans.

I should be clear: If you're buying a portable fan to use instead of your air conditioner or as a way to decrease your air conditioning use inside, you'll be decreasing your carbon footprint. A 2022 University of Sydney study found that using fans in conjunction with occasional AC use can drastically cut energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. But the trend I'm seeing isn't folks using handheld fans in this way — instead, it's using them to avoid the heavy blanket of heat that smacks you when you step outside while keeping the AC on blast while inside.

The fans' existence is twofold: a response to our economic system — our capitalist modes of production rely on a dependence on fossil fuels and a global supply chain built on ecological destruction and exploitation, leading to rising temperatures as well as a rise in people buying and depending on portable fans (the production of which adds to the destruction) — and a trend, thanks to social media.

It’s also worth noting that fans trending isn’t solely a necessary response to the creeping climate crisis. When a trend reaches escape velocity, it becomes a logic ouroboros: You get a fan because getting a fan is what everyone is doing, which means someone else gets a fan, and the snake eats its tail. And people love having the right accessories, even if they don’t necessarily need them. Sure, it’s mindless consumption, but sometimes we buy things because they’re cute and they’re in vogue. To wit: Nobody needs a Labubu. Sometimes a portable fan is just a thing attached to your bag, even if it’s also a sign of climate doom.

Still, portable fans are just one of many ways capitalism has commodified survival by prioritizing profits above all else. Bottled water is essential in areas where public water is either unavailable or contaminated; air purifiers and N95 masks are necessary in some areas with wildfire smoke, pollution, or industrial smog. There's climate insurance; emergency survival kits; portable solar panels — the list is ongoing.

As heat becomes more intense and widespread, the economic system we have built our lives upon will force many of us to look to it for solutions we must purchase privately, like portable fans. In the absence of a government that addresses the systemic causes of climate change, we are forced into the role of helping companies squeeze profits from existing systems. Governments and corporations avoid large-scale climate mitigation to instead place responsibility on individuals to attempt to manage these risks.

All this individualizes responsibility while absolving state actors. We’re left to our own devices. Portable fans are cute; they're also a symbol and tool of alienation.

When the response to climate change is reduced to choosing the "best" fan on Amazon or TikTok, political energy is funneled into consumer decision-making rather than collective action. In short, the  portable fan is a microcosm of capitalist climate failure — but at least it comes in seven pastel colors.