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We tested 16 additional hair dryers, and although we’re still confident in our picks, we’ve discovered a few other good hair dryers.
Most hair dryers are effective at blowing hot air toward your head—sometimes quite fast—in order to speed along your hair styling from showering to whatever’s next. It’s the small differences between models that can make a big difference overall, particularly with daily use. After putting in 20 hours of research and spending nearly 50 hours testing 39 dryers, we’ve found that some dryers are far more pleasant to hold and use than others. Because it provides an excellent experience for the price, we think the Rusk W8less Professional 2000 Watt Dryer is the best choice.
We looked only at dryers with multiple heat settings. We also preferred a cool-shot option.
A too-short cord renders even the most effective hair dryer useless in certain situations.
Lighter-weight dryers (around a pound) are easier and more enjoyable to use for long periods of time.
Our favorite hair dryer is lightweight and equipped with a long cord, and among the models we tested, it tied for blowing the hottest and fastest air. We like it just as much as dryers several times the price.
*At the time of publishing, the price was $110.
Speed and heat are the only features that matter for drying your hair efficiently, and with a 55 mph airflow that exceeds 245 degrees Fahrenheit, the Rusk W8less Professional 2000 Watt Dryer is one of the fastest and hottest dryers we tested. It weighs less than a pound, it has an 8-foot cord (one of the longest we found), it’s notably comfortable to hold, and overall it has the best combination of features we deem important—and that’s the case by far, even when you compare it with dryers that cost hundreds of dollars. The Rusk W8less comes with a concentrator, which is helpful for straightening hair. It does not come with a diffuser, however; if you use one for curly hair, consider our budget pick, which is faster but heavier and doesn’t get nearly as hot as the W8less.
Although this dryer is just as fast as pricier models, it’s one of the heaviest we tested, and its attachments can be hard to remove.
*At the time of publishing, the price was $25.
If you don’t care about weight, consider the InfinitiPro by Conair 1875-Watt Salon Performance AC Motor Styling Tool. Commonly found in drugstores, this dryer produces airflow that’s faster (65 mph) than that of our top pick and almost as hot (205 °F). At 1.3 pounds, however, it may feel heavy after you spend a couple of minutes holding it above your head. The 6-foot cord, though shorter than those on our other picks, is longer than those on most other inexpensive hair dryers. The buttons are easy to use, but the cool-shot button is a little small and harder to hold down than the cool-shot button on our top pick. The InfinitiPro comes with both a diffuser and a concentrator.
It’s expensive, but the unique design makes it extraordinarily nice to use: There’s no vibration whatsoever, and the simple-to-switch magnetic attachments make styling easier.
If you are willing to splurge on a dryer, you might consider the Dyson Supersonic Hair Dryer. It has consistently been our favorite to use since we first tested it in 2016. With airflow at 88 mph and a temperature surpassing 245 °F (the hottest temperature our weather meter could measure), the Supersonic doesn’t dry hair any faster than our pick, but it is more pleasant to use in almost every way due to its unique design. The motor sits in the handle, making the nozzle shorter and easier to maneuver. The handle doesn’t vibrate at all, which wasn’t true of other “luxury” models we tested. It has a long, 9-foot cord, and it’s less grating noise-wise than other dryers. It also comes with two magnetically attaching concentrators and a diffuser, all of which are exceptionally easy to add or remove mid-blowout.
It’s pricey, it’s bulky, and it works—quickly and gently. For hair that’s fragile or difficult to blow-dry with a conventional hair dryer, the RevAir is worth considering.
*At the time of publishing, the price was $350.
Another spendy dryer, the RevAir, is unlike any other hair-drying, heat-styling tool we’ve tested. For people with Type 3 or 4 curl patterns especially, this vacuum-like device is gentle on fragile strands and can cut down total drying time significantly. One tester, who usually requires two back-to-back appointments with a professional stylist at Drybar, now achieves similar drying and smoothing results with the RevAir in as little as 20 minutes. The entire corded machine has an exceptionally large footprint compared with most other dryers: It weighs about 10 pounds in total and is the size of a small microwave. The hose-attached handheld wand alone weighs more than our heavier dryer picks (around 2 pounds), but we found that this is not terribly problematic because very little motion is required to use it.
Our favorite hair dryer is lightweight and equipped with a long cord, and among the models we tested, it tied for blowing the hottest and fastest air. We like it just as much as dryers several times the price.
*At the time of publishing, the price was $110.
Although this dryer is just as fast as pricier models, it’s one of the heaviest we tested, and its attachments can be hard to remove.
*At the time of publishing, the price was $25.
It’s expensive, but the unique design makes it extraordinarily nice to use: There’s no vibration whatsoever, and the simple-to-switch magnetic attachments make styling easier.
It’s pricey, it’s bulky, and it works—quickly and gently. For hair that’s fragile or difficult to blow-dry with a conventional hair dryer, the RevAir is worth considering.
*At the time of publishing, the price was $350.
We interviewed two dermatologists to learn how heat styling affects hair: Melissa Piliang, who specializes in hair disorders at the Cleveland Clinic, and Rebecca Kazin, an assistant professor of dermatology at Johns Hopkins. We also spoke to Allen Ruiz, Aveda’s global director of hair styling; Perry Romanowski, a cosmetic chemist; and Jim Shapiro, an electrical engineer. We spoke to a second engineer at a large research university just long enough to get his informed opinion that there’s no obvious mechanism for a lot of the claims that hair dryer manufacturers make. In addition, we consulted hair-dryer-related patents.
If you can’t leave the house with wet hair for aesthetic reasons or because it’s below freezing outside and you don’t want your head to be covered in icicles, you need a hair dryer. You also need one if you plan on using other hot tools on your hair: Make sure you’re really getting your hair dry if you’re going to take a flat iron to it (smushing hair between two hot pieces of metal is really bad for it if it’s still wet, according to our dermatologist sources). But even if you normally let your hair air-dry, blow-drying it could help protect it from breakage.
Despite what magazine lists and advertisements would have you believe (hair dryers for coarse hair! hair dryers for thin hair! hair dryers for dry hair!), hair dryers are one-size-fits-all. No dryer will make your hair more marvelously voluminous and glossy than another. What your hair looks like comes down to technique, products, and, in large part, its natural characteristics.
The packaging for hair dryers is adorned with a ton of buzzwords and specs. Most of these “features” are useless at best and pseudoscience at worst. There are no clinical studies examining whether one type of hair dryer is better for your hair than another—at least, none that we, nor the dermatologists we interviewed, could find.
For all the words and phrases associated with hair dryers—“tourmaline,” “ionic,” “ceramic,” “conditioning nano beads”—hairstylist Allen Ruiz told us he looks for two qualities in the appliance: “hot and fast.” (And that said, in our testing, differences in heat and speed from dryer to dryer often failed to noticeably affect the dry time.)
The hotness and fastness of a hair dryer are connected to the wattage, but they’re not perfectly correlated: A very high-wattage dryer can produce more heat than a lower-wattage one, but that doesn’t mean it will. Most hair dryers (including most of our picks) are about 1,875 watts anyway. And according to engineer Jim Shapiro, “Essentially all of the energy used by each dryer will be converted into heat, so don’t expect or look for much difference among the dryers here.” For all the buzzwords and superlatives you can find on the side of hair dryer boxes, the key specs don’t vary much from model to model.
Beyond heat and speed, we considered the following features:
Hairstylist Allen Ruiz told us he looks for two qualities in the appliance: “hot and fast.”
Objective features aside, the main thing that separated the dryers we loved from those we didn’t was a bit harder to quantify: how they felt in our hands. In addition to weight, that overall feel depends on the following factors:
We did not consider folding or other “travel” hair dryers. Instead, we prioritized certain features, including nozzle length and body weight. Travel dryers sacrifice comfort (their handles are typically clunky) and have additional components that can break. Some of the truly compact ones offer a smaller design at the expense of solid wattage, the ability to attach a diffuser, and the inclusion of a cool-shot button. Judging from how budget dryers performed in our tests, we can say that any hotel hair dryer offering over 1,800 watts should give you the same results as a spendier one that you bring from home.
Ultimately, because we found so many dryers that fit our criteria during our first round of research, we chose to test an initial group of 15 models that had great reviews from other sources, such as Good Housekeeping (which, unlike most mainstream magazines, has a testing strategy for its recommended dryers), as well as Amazon, Sephora, and drugstore websites. In 2020 and 2021, we added to that original testing pool another 24 highly rated hair dryers.
We took basic stats on our dryers, using a weather meter to test the speed and heat and a postage scale to weigh them. We also measured the cord lengths. Often our own readings disagreed with the manufacturer-stated specs. We found that on the top setting, most dryers blew air at about 40 mph as measured a couple of inches away from the nozzle. That blowing air was around 200 °F (more if we held the dryer in place for a few moments). Although some dryers achieved faster wind speeds than others, interestingly that didn’t end up translating to notably or consistently faster dry times once we used them on our hair.
All of the dryers took more or less the same amount of time to dry hair.
For the initial iteration of this guide, we timed the models drying a swatch of hair from a wig wetted with 5 grams of water, with the dryers on their highest setting. We tested the dryer that had an on/off switch for ions, the Harry Josh model, in both positions. If there were big differences in the quality of the air a dryer gave off, they would show in these tests.
Two things became clear after our first round of swatch time tests: First, all of the dryers took more or less the same amount of time to dry hair. Little things, such as how close we held the dryer or how the hair moved around, were what really made the hair dry faster or slower. Second, in this round we also found that many of the dryers had designs that made them annoying to use. (See the Competition section for more details.)
With a few dryers eliminated, we put our favorites through some more time tests with the hair swatch and then brought them home for a couple of weeks and used them in our daily routines, timing how long they took to dry hair and feeling for any general differences in the quality of the resulting blowout. We found basically none. Many of the dryers we looked at had marketing copy claiming that they were some percentage faster than the competition and that they would leave hair looking better than the competition—promises often corroborated by Amazon reviews. There could well be a collection of slow dryers out there that make your hair look like crap and that everyone else is comparing these models with, but we didn’t seek them out.
Since originally publishing this review, we’ve continued to test our picks over the course of months and years for durability, paying mind to the subtle aspects of user experience that become apparent over long-term use.
Our favorite hair dryer is lightweight and equipped with a long cord, and among the models we tested, it tied for blowing the hottest and fastest air. We like it just as much as dryers several times the price.
*At the time of publishing, the price was $110.
The Rusk W8less Professional 2000 Watt Dryer offers all the features you need in a hair dryer while costing a fraction of the price of a luxury model. The W8less is one of the lightest, fastest, and hottest dryers we’ve tried (1 pound, 55 mph, and over 245 °F, respectively). Those are the only features that matter for drying your hair efficiently.
The buttons are all nicely placed—easy to push but hard to press accidentally—and the cord is long enough (8 feet) to reach distant outlets. Unlike on other dryers, the cool-shot button is wide, so holding it down for several seconds isn’t uncomfortable.
The housing is nice: It’s glossy white, and the logo is understated. The handle is slightly curved, with a notch at the top. The sound of the air is smooth. The dryer comes with a concentrator, too.
Most important, the Rusk W8less takes about the same amount of time to blow-dry hair as dryers that cost hundreds of dollars. It’s capable of making your hair look just as nice as any other dryer.
The Rusk W8less comes with a two-year warranty.
The Rusk W8less doesn’t come with a diffuser. If you have curly hair and prefer using a diffuser to dry it, you have to buy one separately (though it’s best to buy a hair dryer that comes with one, like our budget pick). We’ve seen the price of this dryer fluctuate a lot on Amazon, which can be frustrating if you’re taking your time to consider a purchase; on the other hand, you could score a surprise deal.
Although this dryer is just as fast as pricier models, it’s one of the heaviest we tested, and its attachments can be hard to remove.
*At the time of publishing, the price was $25.
In our tests, the airflow from the InfinitiPro by Conair 1875-Watt Salon Performance AC Motor Styling Tool was faster than that of our top pick at 65 mph, but at 205 °F it was not as hot as that Rusk model (which reached over 245 °F). This hair dryer is considerably less expensive, too.
The main reason it’s not our top pick is its weight: At 1.3 pounds, it’s noticeably heavier to hold than the Rusk, especially after several minutes of drying.
Its cord is 6 feet long—not quite as long as that of our top pick, but longer than the cords on other models you can find at a drugstore.
The InfinitiPro typically comes with a concentrator and a diffuser (but some colors, such as black, come with only the concentrator). Although these pieces snap onto the nozzle, they look as if they might screw on, which can be confusing at first.
Conair covers the InfinitiPro with an impressive four-year warranty (PDF). This dryer is usually available in six color options.
It’s expensive, but the unique design makes it extraordinarily nice to use: There’s no vibration whatsoever, and the simple-to-switch magnetic attachments make styling easier.
It’s no more effective than our other picks, but if you want the most pleasant hair-drying experience possible, the Dyson Supersonic Hair Dryer provides that. This dryer has an unusual design that makes it extraordinarily nice to use. It doesn’t vibrate whatsoever (all other dryers vibrate just a little, and the effect is not especially noticeable until you hold one that doesn’t), and its simple-to-switch magnetic attachments make styling with a diffuser or a concentrator easier. The dryer has a 9-foot cord.
The Dyson offers the fastest wind speed of all the dryers we’ve tested (88 mph measured at a distance of 2 inches) and ties our top pick for the hottest air at over 245 °F, the highest temperature our weather meter could measure. However, in our tests the air speed tangled our hair more, and Good Housekeeping found even the lower speed settings to be too strong. (For an additional $40, you can buy Dyson’s Gentle diffuser.) Although other reviewers (video) have found that the Dyson can sometimes dry hair a tad faster than the competition, after we put in a week of careful timed testing on our own hair, we found that this wasn’t consistently true: Drying hair with the Dyson sometimes took a bit longer than with our top pick.
The concentrator and diffuser attachments connect to the nozzle magnetically, a nifty feature we haven’t seen on any other dryer. They don’t get burning hot, as they’re made of two layers of plastic with a gap of air between them, so you can rotate or remove them mid-session, unlike on other dryers, where you must handle attachments carefully or angle the dryer awkwardly to switch them.
Although the Dyson dryer’s feel and attachments are improvements over those of our other picks, we also found features we didn’t like and a few that we were neutral on.
The position of the speed and heat buttons on the back of the dryer’s head makes them hard to reach, and the cool-shot button is in an awkward spot at the very top of the handle. If you don’t change speeds and temperature a lot, though, the button locations might be a bonus, as they are hard to hit accidentally. Meanwhile, the cord has a small power bar near the plug, which itself is bulky.
The motor sits in the handle of the dryer, rather than in the head, and the handle is straight and a tad thicker than that of the Rusk. Dyson says the motor placement makes the weight of the dryer more balanced, since it’s not top-heavy. The difference isn’t huge, but over weeks of using the Dyson dryer, we found ourselves appreciating the configuration. If you have trouble gripping a typical dryer, the weight distribution of this one might make gripping easier, a reader told us.
The motor sucks air through a fine mesh from the bottom of the handle rather than through a grill at the back of the dryer, and the company claims it’s difficult for long hair to get stuck in the filter as a result. (Much of Dyson’s $71 million research and design tab for the dryer went into the motor, which is a smaller version of the motor found in Dyson’s handheld vacuum cleaners.)
At 1 pound, the Dyson Supersonic is the same weight as our top pick, the Rusk W8less. One tester found that the heavier cord tired out her arms when she was drying the top of her head, though resting the power bar (which most dryers do not have) on the counter helped. The sound the Dyson emits is a high-pitched whine with none of the low rattle that other dryers put out. Whether this sound is more pleasant, as the company claims, is a matter of personal opinion, though. As with any dryer, the sound of whooshing air is physically impossible to eliminate.
Despite the Dyson’s flaws, one tester found herself reaching for it consistently over our other picks in 2016, when she initially tested it, and again in 2018, when she did a second round of testing. Overall, compared with other dryers we’ve tested, this one truly feels like a luxury to use every day. If you decide that the Dyson dryer might be worth $400 to you, we recommend purchasing it from Sephora, which has a generous return policy. Dyson also sells refurbished versions of this hair dryer at reduced prices on eBay. These units carry a one-year warranty but are non-returnable.
Just remember, this model can’t make your hair look any different than other dryers can. Some reviewers claim that it does (as is common with luxury dryers), perhaps in part because the company likes to show off its tools to journalists with the help of professionals.
The Supersonic has a two-year warranty and comes in four color combinations.
It’s pricey, it’s bulky, and it works—quickly and gently. For hair that’s fragile or difficult to blow-dry with a conventional hair dryer, the RevAir is worth considering.
*At the time of publishing, the price was $350.
If you have hair that is damage-prone or very curly, or if it takes forever to blow-dry, the benefits of the RevAir might be worth its extra expense (for additional details, read our full RevAir review). This unconventional hair-drying vacuum is expensive, bulky, and loud, but it’s extremely effective, providing a particularly gentle, expedient way to dry your hair. It relies on “reverse air” suction to simultaneously dry, stretch, straighten, and smooth hair.
The RevAir is a different animal from the other, more conventional hair dryers we recommend, so comparing specs such as wind speed doesn’t make sense. But anecdotally, we found that this unique appliance consistently dried and straightened our tester’s curly hair much faster than any traditional dryer, with minimal tangling and hair shedding. Other reviewers’ reactions to the RevAir vary by hair type: For those with finer, less curly hair, it tends to be an appealing novelty (video) not necessarily worth shelling out for, while those with Type 3 or 4 curl patterns tend to find it revolutionary and worth the splurge (video).
It has a 7-foot hose that attaches to a 9-inch heat-producing wand. At 2 pounds, the wand alone is heavier than any of our dryer picks. Rather than raising the dryer to your hair, however, you insert sections of your hair into the wand; the device then quickly and gently sucks the damp hair dry. It offers seven suction power levels and three heat settings (high, low, or the no-heat cool shot).
The RevAir has no purpose other than hair drying and straightening; it doesn’t accommodate (or need) attachments such as a diffuser or concentrator. It’s also huge. Unlike our other picks, it doesn’t easily fit in bathroom cabinets or on a countertop: Altogether it weighs 10 pounds and is the size of a small microwave.
The RevAir comes with a one-year warranty, half the coverage period of the Rusk W8less and the Dyson Supersonic.
A common feature that hair dryer makers tout is the ability to make hair shinier. When we asked hairstylist Allen Ruiz about the best way to get shiny hair, he said: “Use a product that leaves the hair shiny and smooth.” Which is to say, shiny hair doesn’t really have anything to do with the dryer. Cosmetic chemist Perry Romanowski told us that the only things a blow dryer could do that styling products couldn’t were to “dry the hair more uniformly and keep hair straight.” Straight hair can be shinier hair: On straight hair, the cuticle—the outer, scaly layer of a strand of hair—lies flatter, reflecting light. But even if your goal is to have shiny, straight hair, the only dryer qualities that can help you achieve that more effectively are good old “hot and fast.”
You’ll see plenty of features—ceramic coils, an ion generator, tourmaline—noted in marketing materials and pretty much every other dryer buying guide. But those are features of nearly all dryers. We visited the hair dryer section of Sephora twice while writing this guide and failed to extract any logical reason from the salespeople as to why their curated selection of designer dryers were better than other options.
Ions are technically able to reduce frizz—but only frizz from static. Wet hair cannot hold a charge.
One thing that you should definitely avoid are retail employees who tell you that a $200 dryer is special “because it has ions.” Mainstream magazines and hair dryer packaging commonly promote ions as a feature that makes hair less frizzy and more shiny. Hair dryers do produce ions, which are just particles (of air, in this case) that are charged (negatively, in this case). We found a report in which a high school physics teacher put an ionic dryer in front of a device that measures ions, and lo, it found something to measure.
But because almost all hair dryers are “ionic,” it’s hardly a thing worth debating, except for academic clarity. Our tests (below) didn’t show any meaningful difference with ionic settings on or off.
Engineer Jim Shapiro’s opinion: “Ions? Please.”
Ions are technically able to reduce frizz—but only frizz from static. If you brush your hair while blow-drying it—or you just exist, in the winter months, depending on your hair—positive charge can build up, causing strands to repel away from your head and stick out. But wet hair cannot hold a charge. A blast of negative ions from a hair dryer on dry hair would bring it back to a neutral charge, but if you have a huge static issue, you can also just use a smoothing cream (which is easier to fit in a bag anyway) or a tiny bit of water.
Another claim regarding ions is that they can break up water molecules and speed up drying time. We couldn’t find any reason this would be the case, and neither could the engineers we spoke to. Doctor and prominent skeptic Ben Goldacre has questioned the ions-make-water-droplets-smaller phenomenon, too, on his blog Bad Science. Still, for good measure, we planned to test an ion-button-equipped dryer with and without ions in effect, just to see for ourselves if we were missing something.
Finally, sometimes makers of hair dryers with an on/off ion button claim that the feature is there so that you can use the dryer with the ion button set to “off” for fine hair to make it more voluminous. This could possibly work only if you were going for the kind of volume produced by static electricity.
As for other features, the dermatologists we interviewed recommended ceramic-coated coils. They provide “a more even heat” than other materials, according to Melissa Piliang. All hair dryers work by heating up an element, such as a metal coil, and then blowing air over it, carrying the heat to your head. Ceramic material does heat up faster and radiate heat more evenly than iron or nickel. (Many space heaters also employ ceramic elements.) But the engineers we spoke to were skeptical that this component makes much of a difference in drying hair: Radiant heat isn’t really helpful “unless you expect to direct the heat far from the dryer,” said Shapiro, such as if you were trying to use a dryer to heat a room for some reason. Any heating element in a dryer gets the heat to your head via the blowing air. And though ceramic material does heat evenly, we couldn’t feel a difference in the heat coming from the dryers we tested with ceramic coils versus those made with other materials. Regardless, you should move your dryer around as you do your hair, so the exact evenness of the heat coming from the dryer doesn’t matter too much. The bottom line is that most hair dryers have ceramic-coated elements anyway; don’t let a box’s claims fool you into thinking you’re getting something special.
Another material commonly found inside hair dryers is the mineral tourmaline, which is supposed to help reduce frizz. Even a piddly little wall-mounted hair dryer in a hotel one tester stayed at while writing this guide claimed to have it. The mineral is very pretty, but as Shapiro said: “Tourmaline? Please, squared.” It’s impossible to see the tourmaline because it’s ground up and in the barrel of the dryer, and it doesn’t have to be present in large amounts to be advertised on the box: Patents for gemstone dryers that we read involve a slew of minerals that manufacturers use to coat the inside of the dryer. Rebecca Kazin told us that she looked for tourmaline in a hair dryer but that there were no clinical studies on its being better for hair. Her exact words were: “I believe in tourmaline.” We read—in a patent—that heated tourmaline can emit electromagnetic radiation that can alter the structure of your hair. The person who holds that patent also has one for a device that diagnoses “body deficiencies” (the patent is not specific, but it does say you treat them with drugs) by measuring a person’s electromagnetic field. (Patents can give you a great idea of how something is supposed to work but are not necessarily fact-checked for scientific accuracy.)
You can ignore claims about “conditioning nano beads” or “silk proteins” that are, supposedly, infused in the heating elements and barrels of some dryers. “That is just marketing hype,” Romanowski said.
To our surprise, we found that blow-drying might be better for hair than air-drying, for a couple of reasons. Extended contact with water causes the stuff in between a hair’s cuticles, called the cell membrane complex, to swell and bulge, weakening the hair slightly. As a result, putting your hair up in a ponytail when it’s wet can cause breakage, as dermatologist Rebecca Kazin pointed out, because the strands are weighed down with water. One small study found that blow-drying while holding the dryer 6 inches away from your head actually causes less overall damage than air-drying. Using a hair dryer still causes more damage to the outer layer of hair, but if breakage is a problem for you, blow-drying your hair on a low setting could be helpful.
Dermatologist Melissa Piliang advised that “it’s best to embrace your natural texture” and not fight it when you are choosing how to dry your hair, because doing so can make it frizzier over the long run. Ads for hair products and articles in mainstream magazines like to equate healthy hair with smooth and shiny hair. But shininess isn’t the same as health—we checked with dermatologists.
One small study found that blow-drying while holding the dryer 6 inches away from your head actually causes less overall damage than air-drying.
All hair dryers cause some damage. Hair cuticles are “kind of like shingles on a roof,” Piliang explained. Heat causes them to dry out and peel up, which can let in moisture and increase frizz. Some hair is just naturally more dry to begin with, which means it starts out more prone to frizz.
To minimize damage, Piliang advises decreasing the overall time you have to spend pointing hot air at your hair by towel-drying it first. Then, blow-dry it in sections. Clip some of your hair up in a half ponytail, dry what’s underneath, and then undo the ponytail so you’re not just subjecting the same dry strands to direct heat. While you’re drying, hold the blow dryer so that it shoots air downward, with the grain of the hair cuticle, rather than against it. Although no conventional dryer we’ve tested has proven notably faster than another, following this method (versus drying hair without pinning it up and going in sections) reliably saves us a couple of minutes in drying our hair.
Don’t keep blasting your hair with the highest heat setting, Piliang said. When your hair is almost dry, turn the dryer to a lower setting. (Cooler air takes a little longer to finish drying hair; personally, we’re too impatient for this.) Also, don’t use a metal round brush to style your hair, she told us; it just transfers heat directly to your hair, which is bad for the cuticles. Use a plastic brush and “keep things moving,” she said, so you’re not blasting any one spot with heat for too long.
If you have curly hair, don’t brush it as you are drying it, as that will just ruffle the cuticle (unless you are trying to straighten it). A diffuser will help you work with your natural hair shape, an approach that is less damaging to your hair than trying to make it do something it doesn’t naturally do. Most, but not all, blow dryers are at least compatible with a diffuser, and you can buy one easily if one doesn’t come with the dryer. “I prefer a diffuser with ‘fingers’ in it for creating really defined curl,” hairstylist Allen Ruiz told us. “You want to work section by section and make sure to tilt and lean your head as you go, gently [putting each] section of curls into the diffuser.” (Here’s a video that shows what he means.)
The PR team behind the Harry Josh Pro Tools Pro Dryer 2000 seems successful: The dryer appears three times in this list of items that beauty editors “swear by.” The team has also done a great job of placing targeted ads all over social media. One infomercial the ads link to features celebrity hairstylist Harry Josh himself discussing people whose hair he has styled for magazines. Covers flash on the screen: Amanda Seyfried, Katy Perry, Tina Fey. The Instagram tag #HarryJosh reveals owner shots of the dryer messily nestled among expensive makeup, styled PR shots of Harry Josh products, and supermodel Karlie Kloss kissing Josh on the cheek.
There are things about this dryer that are genuinely nice. It has a short nozzle, which would make it slightly easier to fit in a suitcase for travel, though our top pick and runner-up aren’t so much bigger that either one would be an issue in your average weekend bag. The matte-finish seafoam green color is pretty. In addition to the proximity to celebrity hair, this is what you’re paying for. In our tests, the cool-shot button was easy to push, and all the buttons were placed nicely on the back of the dryer—no poking, no accidental pushing.
Hype aside, this dryer has only one major design drawback: On our scale, the Harry Josh dryer, at 1.21 pounds, was on the heavier side of the models we tested.
But the real issue with the Harry Josh dryer is that, in our testing, it didn’t deliver the superior hair experience it claims to. In addition to promoting the usual erroneous facts about ions that get stamped on hair dryers, Josh has said that this model blows air at 81 mph. We’re not sure how he got that number, because our weather meter said 40 mph. It’s possible that the Harry Josh dryer will last longer than other dryers, though the warranty covers two years, the same length as the coverage on our top pick.
The Dyson Airwrap is a multipurpose styling tool with a number of attachments that can curl, straighten (with a brush), or blow-dry hair (with an add-on that looks like a thinner, oval version of the Supersonic head). We haven’t taken a wind meter to it, but the company says the dryer-attachment-equipped Airwrap is not as powerful as the Supersonic and is meant to get hair a bit dry before you use the other attachments, which, unlike most other curlers and straighteners, can work on damp hair. It also isn’t compatible with a diffuser or concentrator.
Three testers with different hair types and textures had polarized opinions on the $550 Airwrap, especially when comparing their brush-attachment blowout results with those they achieved with the $60 Revlon One-Step Hair Dryer and Volumizer, a revered hot-air brush that’s a best seller on Amazon. Neither the Airwrap nor the One-Step Hair Dryer and Volumizer is a standard hair dryer, so we didn’t compare them against our picks for this guide. We did attempt to test the styling tools against one another, but we found that comparison, well, hairy.
Hair dryer brushes like the Revlon One-Step Hair Dryer and Volumizer circulate heated air from within, through holes between the bristles. They are designed to replace the pairing of a traditional hair dryer with a separate brush. Most hair dryer brushes are cylindrical in shape and have 360 degrees of bristles, as round styling brushes do. However, some people find paddle-style hair dryer brushes gentler and better for detangling than cylindrical models, since this brush style may reduce snagging. Because the bristles and airflow are restricted to one side of a paddle-style hair dryer brush, you have more control over the amount of heat you apply to your hair. This control comes at a cost, though: Paddle-style hair dryer brushes are notorious for being unable to reach hair roots, and it often takes longer to dry a full head of hair with one than it does with either a round hair dryer brush or a traditional hair dryer. However, paddle-style hair dryer brushes do a decent job of drying and straightening hair, especially when you’re preparing hair for a second round of styling (with a curling iron, straightening comb, or braids).
We tried four paddle-style hair dryer brushes, finding the best overall to be the Conair InfinitiPro Hot Air Paddle Brush. Although we recommend the vacuum-style RevAir dryer for people with more fragile strands, for around a tenth of the price the Conair is a decent and similarly gentle option for hair drying and straightening. Despite having the lowest wattage of any of the paddle hair dryer brushes we considered (600 watts), it dried hair sections almost as quickly as the brush we tried with the highest wattage: the Instagram darling EZ Dryer Ion (1,200 watts). This result may be due to two factors unique to the Conair brush, namely its slimmer oval shape (most paddle brushes are wide and rectangular) and a combination of different bristle materials and lengths, all of which make it much easier to dry hair closer to the scalp. Like all of the paddle-style hair dryer brushes we tested, the Conair has three heat settings (high, low, and cool). At less than 11 ounces, it ties with the EZ Dryer Ion for the lightest of the paddle-style models we tested. The Conair has a 5-foot cord and comes with a two-year warranty.
The EZ Dryer Ion is the most effective and efficient paddle-style hair dryer brush we tested. But because it’s missing markings for the air-temperature settings, determining at a glance which setting the brush is on is impossible. More important, it lacks an ALCI (appliance leakage current interrupter) safety plug, so if it shorts or is immersed in water, the device won’t automatically turn off and therefore could cause an electrical shock. It’s covered by an ultrashort (14-day) warranty, too.
We also tried the Hot Tools One-Step Detachable Straight Dry Paddle Dryer and the Revlon One-Step Hair Dryer and Styler, both of which were clunkier, heavier, and slower to dry than the Conair. Their designs also made it difficult for us to directly reach hair roots compared with the other paddle-style hair dryer brushes we tested.
If you can’t find the Rusk W8less in stock: The BaBylissPro Porcelain Ceramic Carrera2 Dryer is a great substitute. Priced at $100 (though often on sale), it’s not much more expensive than the W8less, but at a pound and a half, it ties with the Conair Pro Yellow Bird for the heaviest dryer we’ve tested. With speeds reaching 60 mph, it’s almost as fast as the W8less (65 mph), and like the W8less it can reach temperatures over 245 °F (the hottest our weather meter could measure). It also has an extra-long cord measuring 9 feet 10 inches—nearly 2 feet longer than the W8less’s cord. Like the W8less, the Carrera2 comes with only a concentrator (not a diffuser) and has two speeds, three temperatures, and a cool shot.
If the Conair InfinitiPro 1875-Watt Styling Tool, our budget pick, is unavailable: The Revlon Turbo-Speed Hair Dryer is an inexpensive, extremely lightweight, serviceable hair dryer. Costing $25 (often on sale for $15 or so) and weighing under a pound, it’s one of the least expensive yet one of the lightest dryers we’ve ever tested. It’s also one of the slowest of the dryers we like (41 mph), and it has the shortest usable cord (5 feet 6 inches). However, the Turbo-Speed is one of the hottest dryers we’ve tested, reaching over 245 °F in just a few seconds, blowing the InfinitiPro’s 205 °F out of the water. It has only two speeds (in contrast to the InfinitiPro’s three), and whereas our budget pick comes with both a diffuser and a concentrator, the Turbo-Speed has only a diffuser. This inexpensive Revlon model is polarizing—people either love it or hate it—and a few damning owner reviews claim that it melts, burns hair, and poses a fire hazard.
If you have Type 4 (coarse and curly) hair and don’t want to shell out for the RevAir: The retro-looking Conair Pro Yellow Bird Hair Dryer is a cult favorite. It’s one of the hottest dryers we’ve tested (reaching over 245 °F), but at a pound and a half, it also ties for the heaviest dryer we’ve looked at. Its buttons are strangely placed and unlabeled, but it’s the only dryer we like that comes with a straightening pick. It also comes with a diffuser, offers four speeds and temperatures (no cool shot), and has a cord measuring an ample 7 feet 10 inches.
We’re evaluating additional hair dryers to see how they compare with our picks. This new group includes the Rusk Pro Speed Titanium Hair Dryer, which the company suggested as a replacement for the outgoing CTC Lite model we previously recommended, and the lightweight Trezoro 9300, an Amazon best seller. We are also testing the Shark HyperAir, which has a variety of attachment options.
The gorgeous GHD Helios 1875W Advanced Professional Hair Dryer is heavier and slower than our pick, the Rusk W8less—and three times the price. However, at over 9.5 feet, its cord ties with that of the Amika Accomplice for the second-longest cord of any hair dryer we’ve tested, and this dryer is especially beautiful.
In comparison with the Rusk W8less, the Amika Accomplice Compact Dryer is heavier, limited to a lower max temperature (215 °F), and double the price. However, its 9.5-foot cord ties with that of the GHD Helios for the second-longest cord among the dryers we’ve tried.
The Conair InfinitiPro SmoothWrap Hair Dryer is slower and has a shorter cord than all of our picks. However, it is lightweight (a pound), and it reaches temperatures above 245 °F.
At 1 pound, the BaBylissPro Rapido Dryer is an ultra-lightweight dryer, and it comes with a 9-foot cord, but it’s slower and over double the price of the Rusk W8less. (We’d go with the company’s Carrera2 over this one if we had to choose between the two.)
Of the Dyson Supersonic lookalikes, the Karrong F350 seemed the most promising to us, but it ended up being half as fast, with no way to control speed separately from temperature—the hotter it got, the faster it got. Also, there was no warranty information to be found.
At an impressive 11 feet long, the CHI Touch 2 Dryer’s cord is the longest of any dryer we’ve tested, but this dryer is more expensive and much slower than the Rusk W8less. It also has a mere one year of warranty coverage, and its non-intuitive touchscreen felt gimmicky.
The lightweight and long-corded Hot Tools Professional Black Gold Turbo Ionic Salon Dryer is a little heavier and not as fast as the Rusk W8less, and it’s typically more expensive, too. On top of that, owner reviews allege poor longevity. (This dryer is covered by a whopping seven-year warranty, though.)
The Hot Tools Professional Black Gold Turbo Ionic Salon Dryer (DC Motor) is extremely light at only 14 ounces. But it also has the most buttons and slides and switches of any hair dryer we’ve ever tested, including a cool-shot button, a power-boost slide, an ion select wheel, switches for speed and temp—whew! It’s also one of the slower dryers we’ve tested.
The Hot Tools Pro Artist White Gold Digital Salon Dryer, the Panasonic Nanoe EH-NA65, and the Panasonic Nanoe EH-NA67 were all slower, heavier, and more expensive than the Rusk W8less.
We previously recommended the Conair 1875-Watt Tourmaline Ceramic Styling System as a budget option. However, the short, 5-foot cord has been enough of a pain for us to use in the setups we’ve tested that we suggest going with our current budget pick, the InfinitiPro by Conair 1875-Watt Salon Performance AC Motor Styling Tool, which has a longer cord, if you need a very inexpensive dryer. If weight is your primary concern, though, the 1875-Watt Tourmaline Ceramic Styling System is still worth considering: At 0.91 pound, this model is lighter than our budget pick.
The Revlon 1875-Watt Infrared Hair Dryer produced a wind speed of 45 mph (measured directly in front of the nozzle), slower than the speed we got from our picks. It weighs just over a pound, has a cord measuring 5.5 feet, and comes with a concentrator and a diffuser. But the mediocre specs, along with the gimmicky red lights that flash while you’re blow-drying, kept this dryer from being a pick, even though it was a particularly inexpensive model at the time of our tests.
Although the 1,875-watt Revlon Compact Styler is a wallet-saver at around $10, the savings do not make up for the dryer’s added heft, its lack of attachments, and its reduced wind speeds compared with our picks.
The Gold ’N Hot Ultra-Lightweight Dryer with Tourmaline is the lightest dryer we’ve tested, at 0.6 pound. However, the measured air speed was only 45 mph, and we found the handle thick and awkward to hold.
We found that the handle on the Remington T-Studio Pearl Ceramic Professional AC Hair Dryer AC2015 vibrated unpleasantly when we put it on its highest speed setting.
The Remington Damage Protection Hair Dryer D3190 comes with a diffuser and concentrator but is bulkier and heavier than other models we tested.
In our testing, the BaBylissPro Nano Titanium Hair Dryer produced a whining sound that was worse than any noise from competitors.
The Bio Ionic 10X Ultralight Speed Dryer is a tad lighter (0.92 pound) than our top pick and has a slightly longer cord. However, the dryer doesn’t have separate wind-speed and temperature-control settings (if you want hot air, it must also be fast).
The Drybar Buttercup Blow Dryer is heavier than our picks, at 1.3 pounds. The air speed is also slower, at just over 30 mph measured at a distance of 2 inches.
Elchim offers an impressive warranty and repair program that covers all its hair dryers. At 1.2 pounds, however, the Elchim Classic 2001 is heavier than our picks, and we found the handle to be thick and awkward to hold.
Amazon customer reviews of the 1,900-watt Parlux 3200 Hair Dryer were pretty good at the time of our research, and the compact design is nice. But the buttons on this model are positioned on the side, and they made the dryer hard for us to hold without getting poked in the hand.
The DevaDryer by DevaCurl is slower and heavier than our picks. However, after a few wash-and-go tests, our curly-haired testers found that they liked using the included DevaFuser attachment, a unique hand-shaped diffuser that helps dry curls and waves without losing definition. You can buy a universal-fit version of the DevaFuser for any attachment-compatible hair dryer.
The Conair 1875-Watt 3-in-1 Ionic Styler has a long row of grills (and a brush attachment) instead of a circular nozzle. It gives you no way to attach a diffuser, which means you’re stuck with a single-purpose dryer.
Yoonhee Lee, MD, et al., Hair Shaft Damage from Heat and Drying Time of Hair Dryer, Annals of Dermatology, November 3, 2011
Jason English, The Ionic Hair Dryer, The Physics Teacher, September 25, 2007
Perry Romanowski, cosmetic chemist, email interview, October 22, 2015
Jim Shapiro, engineer, email interview, September 1, 2015
Melissa Piliang, MD, dermatologist at the Cleveland Clinic, phone interview, September 29, 2015
Rebecca Kazin, MD, assistant professor, Johns Hopkins Department of Dermatology, phone interview, October 2, 2015
Allen Ruiz, global director of hair styling, Aveda, email interview, October 8, 2015
Stephanie Saltzman, Expert Tips for a Better (Faster) Blowout: How to Pick the Right Hair-Dryer, Allure, March 20, 2013
Devri Velázquez, How to Use a Diffuser Without Ruining Your Curls, NaturallyCurly, June 11, 2018
Nancy Redd is a senior staff writer at Wirecutter covering everything from Santa hats to bath bombs. She is also a GLAAD Award–nominated on-air host and a New York Times best-selling author. Her latest picture book, The Real Santa, follows a determined little Black boy's journey to discover what the jolly icon truly looks like.
by Hannah Waters and Tiffany Kelly
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