Sir James Dyson certainly doesn’t do things by half. He revolutionised the vacuum cleaner with cyclonic suction. He revamped fan and heaters with air multiplier technology. Now Dyson has turned his gaze to the hair care market with an incredibly engineered hair dryer called the Supersonic.
I had a chance to test out the Supersonic this morning in my segment on Channel Seven’s Sunrise program. Check the video below to see it in action.
The Supersonic has been in development for the past 4 years, which involved about 50 million pounds, creating a specialised hair laboratory within Dyson, as well as buying over 1600 kilometres of human hair.
The unit is quite light, weighing about half that of regular hairdryers, and it is said to be about 8 times more powerful in terms of moving air, using a form of Dyson’s air multiplier technology. With the motor located in the handle, it’s also very well balanced and easy to hold and wave about.
The Supersonic is amazingly quiet too, thanks partly to the small but powerful digital motor situated in the handle, as well as the lack of turbulence and swirling created in the airstream. I’m also told that the 13 blade fan creates a higher frequency noise than what human ears can hear, compared to a conventional fan.
This is great if you get woken up by a hairdryer in the morning from your better half.
Apart from drying and styling, the Supersonic has been specifically created to keep your hair healthy and shiny. It measures the air temperature 20 times a second making temperature adjustments on the fly to ensure that your hair will never burn or loose its shine due to excessive dryness.
A very clever filtering system stops hair from clogging up the inlets, and if hair does get into the fan, there’s a special notch that collects the hair so it can get chopped up by the blades, and flushed out of the system.
There are clever magnetic styling attachments that snap on, and these are designed with grooves to draw cool air over them so they never get hot.
The Supersonic has a very premium look and feel, with its metal body, fan and temperature switches and LED indicator lights.
No Australian pricing or launch date have been announced yet, although it’s priced at $US399 across the pond, and rumours are that it will be sold within the next couple of months.
Best I have ever used is the Karmin