Nearly eight years since Dyson introduced its take on hair drying to the world, a new model is here boasting improvements to protect your scalp and make styling that little bit easier.
Eight years. Almost, anyway. That’s how long it has been since this somewhat balding journalist found himself writing up Dyson’s most curious gadget yet: a hair dryer from the experts behind small motors that wrangle air to better maintain your life.
Up until this point, Dyson had proven its expertise in air with incredible vacuums, excellent hand dryers, and clever coolers and sophisticated heaters. And in 2016, it handled air in a different way, leveraging a small motor and heating system to dry hair, something this journalist didn’t have much of.
In the past eight years, Dyson has made waves with its hair tech, so much so that it even has a curling wand that uses similar technology and the Coanda principle to literally make waves in hair while heating it. The technology is so clever, even this journalist — who’s lack of hair to-side makes him abysmally pathetic at using any hair gadget — can use one of these clever gadget to style his wife’s hair.
This is all clever technology, and it’s technology getting an upgrade. In fact, it hasn’t been all that long since we heard about one of those updates, something Dyson announced all too recently: a pro-grade hair dryer that could change its settings quickly using RFID in the attachments.
Back when the Dyson Supersonic r launched, we suspected something new would be just around the corner for consumers… and we were right, with Dyson announcing just that this week.
Eight years on from the first Dyson Supersonic hair dryer, Dyson has a new model in the Dyson Supersonic Nural, a model that includes more clever tech aimed at protecting your scalp and pausing the tech when you don’t need to use it.
The company calls it “its most intelligent hair dryer”, largely because it now uses a time of flight sensor which used to appear on older phones and is similar to the LiDAR sensors on recent iPhones, which can measure distance between an object to a gadget.
In the Supersonic Nural, that object is you, using an infrared beam to measure the distance between the hair dryer and your hair to control the heat, getting it down to 55ºC to help keep things comfy and not burn your head.
To let you know what’s going on, there’s an LED in the Nural that will change colours to help, showing red when there’s high heat, orange for medium, and blue or yellow to indicate low heat, all based on the distance from the Nural hair dryer to your head.
There’s also an accelerometer on-board to pause the heating element of the hair dryer when it’s not being used, while attachments can also recall the last used heat and airflow settings, similar to what the Supersonic r is doing to save settings between attachments for the pro-stylist world.
“Innovation only comes from investing in research and development,” said James Dyson, Founder and Chief Engineer at Dyson.
“Our obsession to truly understand the root of the problem continues, as we build up some of the most sophisticated hair laboratories in the world.”
The addition of the Supersonic Nural arrives in Australia for $749, but it won’t come at the expense of the original Supersonic model, which stays in the market for $649 locally.
