Dyson has reinvented some of the most common household appliances in bladeless form including vacuum cleaners to air conditioners, and now its turned its attention to the haircare market with the Dyson Supersonic, which it hopes will rival some of the best hair dryers you can buy right now.
Introduced as the the Dyson Supersonic hair dryer, it's bladeless and designed to blow a fast and focused stream of air. What's more, the hair dryer is engineered to intelligently and carefully controls temperature to help protect your hair from extreme heat damage – and all the terrible frizziness that comes with cooked hair.
The biggest innovation is the way Dyson engineers found a way to shrink the interior motor from the size of a baseball to something closer to the size of D9 battery. The newly minted V9 digital motor is so small that it actually fits in the hair dryer's handle rather the head, making the device better balanced and easier to handle. Despite being so small the V9 engine actually houses 13 blades to move air in a directed stream.
One of the biggest annoyances of hair dryers is the racket they create. And so the engineers at Dyson found a clever way of increasing the frequency beyond the scope of human hearing. Essentially the noise will still be around, but you just won't hear it.
Dyson says the Supersonic hair dryer is the result of four years of work. In that time engineers studied human hair from root to tip, examining how it reacts to stresses, ways to keep it healthy, and styled. The company went so far as to build test rigs, which simulated the different hair drying techniques that have developed around the world.
If you think that level of testing is extreme, the road to the Supersonic hair dryer was paved with £50 million ($71mn) invested in development. Before the final product Dyson also toyed with 600 prototypes and tested over 1,010 miles of hair.
Of course, with such an carefully engineered product comes the hefty price tag of $399 (about £274, AU$523) making it as expensive as a smartphone, tablet or even a premium Chromebook. Dyson is also teaming up with Sephora to offer the hair dryer exclusively at its retail and online stores starting this September.
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