Catherine the Great once described the wind as giving you either imagination or a headache. She hadn’t, of course, accounted for Dyson, which, for the past 20 years, has had the monopoly on harnessing blown air in its award-winning vacuum cleaners, hand-dryers and fans. These products have made Dyson, the man and the company, one of the UK’s greatest stories of innovation and profit. Last year, product sales were up almost 25%, a figure that should soon be bolstered by the next device to be Dyson’d: the hairdryer, and last bastion of air-based appliances.
Although Dyson’s products are efficient and cool if you like to see “where the magic happens” (they are often transparent so you can see the moving parts), they are often very loud. Famously loud. Dirty, too, apparently, but it’s mainly the noise. The hand-dryers and vacuums are thought to reach around 80 decibels, which is the same as standing 15m from a freight train.
The Supersonic hairdryer aims to grapple with being both quiet (a regular hairdryer can go up to 75 decibels. While they won’t reveal what the Dyson decibel level was, I was able to hear my editor laughing at me while I posed for the photograph a few metres away) and efficient. Not the most powerful, but “up there”, explains Becky Newmarch, the Supersonic’s handler and PR.
The first drawback is the price – £299 is fine if you run a professional salon, less fine when a perfectly decent dryer (such as mine) costs £28 and works perfectly well.
Today, the hairdryer arrives in a hard silver case. Newmarch is visibly excited about the Supersonic – mainly because, as of today, she will be “allowed to tell her parents what she has been doing with her life for the past two years”. She doesn’t leave me alone with it.
The fan works by drawing air in through the base into the motor (AKA the V9, Dyson’s smallest, lightest mechanism) where it is amplified by three. The air is directed up and out – handy, as it produces a very direct jet of air (so you can localise which sections you dry) and stops your hair getting dragged into the back in terrifying fashion. The silence is down to the reduction of “turbulence and swirling”, with the motor fitted with 13 blades instead of the standard 11. Truly, the sound is almost inaudible and my hair dries in record time.
The real reason it will do well is arguably down to the cult of Dyson, with its design-led, extensively tested technology. The mantra ‘Never Say Die’ doesn’t hang on the wall of the Dyson Malmesbury research centre for nothing. Following the Apple formula (if Steve Jobs had the black poloneck, then James Dyson is more of a fun socks guy), each bit of kit is designed and patented with Masonic secrecy. Like Apple, its stock is also, partly, couched in ergonomics; how it looks and how it makes you look by owning it. And to me, this is its downfall – for £299, I want something that looks like a raygun.
But does it work? Yes. It’s light, powerful, quiet and can switch between temperatures (two) and speeds (three). But given that it has taken 103 engineers four years to perfect the model, in a purpose-built hair laboratory, where they tested it out on 1,000 miles of hair (“we used the real stuff, the expensive stuff”) and at a cost of £50m, so it should.
The Dyson Supersonic hairdryer goes on sale in June.
