Dyson’s Airwrap uses air, not high heat, to style your hair – CNET

I use a hair dryer daily to make sure my bangs don’t dry like those of The Office‘s surly beet farmer, Dwight Schrute. That’s a necessity for me, but it’s the extent of my hair styling most days. 

That’s partly because I don’t want to take the whole morning to fully dry and then style my thick, wavy hair. I also hate the idea of damaging it with high heat day after day, just to make it “cooperate.” Luxury small appliance maker Dyson has a solution, or so it claims — the $500 Airwrap. We don’t have info on international availability, but the US price converts to about £380 and AU$705. 

At a glance the colorful Airwrap looks like a simple curling iron, but it’s really a multitool, promising to handle everything from drying to styling via tons of attachments. Unlike most hair care gadgets, this one is supposed to blow air and use lower heat. It certainly sounds better for your hair, but theoretically it could save time, too, by taking you from wet hair to dry, styled hair with just one device. 

The Airwrap is “designed with different hair types and desired looks in mind,” Dyson says in the official press release. 

Plug the base into an outlet like a regular ol’ straightener and enlist the prestyling dryer accessory to dry your hair until it’s damp. Damp is the best moisture level for styling, according to Dyson. There are five other attachments to choose from. Here’s what they’re supposed to do:

• Soft smoothing brush – Create body (for fine hair)
• 1.6-inch barrel curler – Create loose curls (for thick, coarse hair)
• 1.2-inch barrel curler – Create tight curls (for most hair types)
• Firm smoothing brush – Straighten hair without adding frizz (for thick, coarse hair)
• Round volumizing brush – Adds volume (for fine hair)

Dyson’s offering three Airwrap product bundles with a curated selection of attachments — the $500 Volume + Shape kit is geared toward fine hair that tends to get flat, the $500 Smooth + Control kit is for thicker hair that tends to get frizzy and the $550 Complete kit includes every Airwrap accessory. 

This all sounds nice, but $500-$550 is way too expensive, even for a multitool. Given that the Dyson Supersonic hair dryer retails for $400, the $500 Airwrap kit is technically a “deal” in Dyson-land, so we’ll have to try this thing out for ourselves to see if there’s any way it’s worth a major hair care upgrade. 

The only missing piece here is hair styling tutorials, which I would definitely need to use a product with this many attachments.