Credit:
Reviewed / Betsey Goldwasser
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Credit:
Reviewed / Betsey Goldwasser
Reviewed's mission is to help you buy the best stuff and get the most out of what you already own. Our team of product experts thoroughly vet every product we recommend to help you cut through the clutter and find what you need.
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Our Best Overall hair dryer gives a sleek blowout and is comfortable to use with its variety of heat and speed settings and lightweight build. Read More
This hair dryer is subpar but includes an oscillating concentrator nozzle that alleviates your tired arm from doing more work. Read More
This dryer is similar to the Dyson Supersonic but comes at a fraction of the price and feels more comfortable to hold. Read More
This dryers is compact and easy to use but gave me puffy results and caused my ears to ring. Read More
This dryers is intuitive to use and powerful, but its weight distribution leads to it feeling heavier. Read More
If you’re like us, you may notice something odd every time you pay a stylist to wash and blow-dry your hair: It looks amazing. Sleek, shiny, and voluminous with seemingly no heat damage—all achievable at the hands of someone else. But with the right hair styling tools, an easy, breezy style should be attainable at home.
We at Reviewed tested a variety of hair dryers to find one that quickly blow-dries hair and leaves it soft and sleek, not frizzy or fried-looking, whether you have hair that's fine, thick, straight, curly, or anything in between.
In the end, we named the BaBylissPro Nano Titanium Dryer (available at Amazon) our Best Overall winner because of its intuitive design and powerful heat and speed settings to get the job done fast. And the drugstore-sold Panasonic Nanoe Salon Hair Dryer is a steal for what it offers—it's lightweight, inexpensive, and dries hair in a snap—making it our Best Value pick.
The BaBylissPro Nano Titanium Dryer is our Best Overall hair dryer for the salon-like blowout it gives.
Intuitive controls
Includes innovative oscillating nozzle
Speed and heat settings can't be controlled independently
Variety of speed and heat settings
Comfortable to hold
Powerful air stream whips hair around
Puffy results
Compact design
Intuitive speed and heat settings
Heavy
High-pitched hum
Puffy results
Powerful air stream
Variety of speed and heat settings
Awkward weight distribution makes it feel heavy
Variety of heat and speed settings
Loud
Heavy
Weak air stream
Sleek design
Compact design
Weak air stream
Semi-damp and puffy results
To test the strength of each dryer, we placed ping pong balls over the barrel and turned each to their highest air setting.
I’m Jessica Kasparian, the former beauty editor at Reviewed, and I've tested everything from makeup to skincare to hair care. I have medium-textured, wavy-curly hair and, at the time of testing, my hair was damaged on the ends (thanks, bleach) and measured about 10 inches past my shoulders.
When I use a hair dryer, I’m hoping to get it completely dry and somewhat straight, in preparation for going over it with a hair straightener. If I want to wear my hair naturally curly, I don’t use any hot tools to style it.
I'm Sara Miranda, the staff beauty writer at Reviewed, and I've also tested dozens of beauty products under the sun. Similar to Jessica, my hair fares more curly-wavy, but I have very thick hair. When testing hair dryers, the ends of my dark brown hair had minimal damage due to daily heat-styling, and it fell about three inches past my shoulders.
My expectations when using a hair dryer are pretty minimal. My hair should come out on the other side of a blow dry looking relatively straight, and, of course, completely dry. After blowdrying, I typically put my hair in curlers for about an hour in order to accentuate my layers—but that's not an everyday occurrence. Whether I'm styling my hair with or without curlers, I blow dry my hair every single day, given that it takes hours for my mane to dry on its own.
To help demystify the daunting task of finding the top hair dryer out there, we considered best-of lists, top sellers at major retailers, and cult favorites of bloggers and reviewers, then narrowed our test field to the best of the best.
After we settled on over a dozen hair dryers at a wide range of costs, we pitted them against each other in a hair-drying battle royale, from everyday usability to the technical stuff few people think of when drying their hair. Our goal? To see if a pricier dryer is really better, or if those hefty price tags are just from brand notoriety.
Before blow drying the hair with each product, we handed them over to our scientists for lab testing. Our technicians put each appliance through a gamut of tests to measure airflow speed, temperature settings, weight, and sound.
For example, to measure air streams, we balanced a pingpong ball on the ends of the nozzles. We then turned each dryer on its highest speed and heat setting, and recorded how high it projected the pingpong ball, using the lab’s brick wall as the measuring stick. The BaBylissPro and Conair dryers aced this test, keeping pingpong balls hovering far above the rest.
From there, we tested each one at home to see how quickly we could achieve a smooth blowout. We wrote down our impressions on the resulting style and experience using and maneuvering the dryer. We also took notes on the weight and balance of each dryer in hand, and any annoying details, like if it was extremely loud or high-pitched.
The final attribute we considered while using the hair dryers was the location and usability of the controls. If the buttons or switches controlling the airflow or heat were placed in a way that wasn’t easily accessible while we were drying our hair, or if they were in the way and caused us to accidentally switch modes, we noted this.
Finally, we compared the scientific and subjective results to find out if any of these aspects actually has an impact on what makes a hair dryer perform well.
Testing the Conair Infiniti's heat output with thermocouples.
Just because a hair dryer can get hotter, doesn’t mean it’s better—higher temperatures don’t necessarily yield straighter or smoother results. In fact, having adjustable heat settings is better than just one hot temperature because you may find a setting causes your scalp to burn or your hair to feel scorched.
Adjustable temperatures are also great to fit with various hair types, so anyone with fine hair can reduce damage to their strands by using a lower heat setting. Meanwhile, those who are prone to frizz can use a lower speed setting to hopefully reduce fly-aways with more intentional blow drying.
A good hair dryer is only a great one if it’s not exhausting to hold and maneuver above your head for upwards of 20 minutes at a time. For this reason, and because many hair dryers claim to be lighter-weight than the competition, we weighed each dryer. In reality, they all came in between 0.8 and 1.8 pounds. One dryer even claims to be "featherweight," and it was one of the heaviest that we tested—that speaks to the mistruths in beauty marketing.
It turns out that a hair dryer is comfortable (or not) to use because of how its weight is distributed. One example: The lighter-weight Dyson feels heavier because its weight is in its large handle and long cord, which drag down your wrist.
Look at any blow dryer at the store and its box will say it's "quieter than the competition." To test that claim, we brought the dryers into our soundproof headphone lab and measured the volume of each hair dryer on its loudest setting. All of the dryers hovered between 7.5 and 8.4 dbA—about as loud as a vacuum cleaner.
However, the hair dryers all sound quite different from each other due to the pitch and speed of the motor. Even so, none of the dryers were quiet enough to have a conversation over: Don't believe the hype when you hear that a new hair dryer is near silent.
Before styling your mane with a hair dryer, you want to make sure that your strands are about 85% damp, says Howard McLaren, co-founder and Creative Director of haircare brand R+Co. McLaren suggests using a towel to sop up excess moisture pre-hair dry, and for an extra layer of protection, spray your strands with a heat-protectant spray like R+Co’s Chainmail Thermal Protection Styling Spray. It promises to safeguard hair from heat that reaches up to 450ºF while leaving hair with a glossy sheen and copious amounts of volume. This heat protectant calls on water lily and celery seed extracts along with sunflower and jojoba oils to volumize and hydrate the hair.
"Starting with hair that’s partially air-dried helps reduce the amount of heat exposure and ensures a smoother, shinier finish," Aaron Grenia, co-founder of IGK Haircare, explains. Grenia adds that semi-dried hair will also help cut down on styling time. He recommends using his brand’s Good Behavior Spirulina Protein Smoothing Spray, a self-proclaimed "heat-activated blowout spray" that uses spirulina protein to make strands stronger in addition to innovative bonding polymers to give hair a smooth finish.
Curly Hair If you’re going for a traditional blow out look, it may be harder to accomplish on naturally wavy or curly hair. It’s not impossible, but you’ll certainly need a high-quality dryer (preferably one with ionic technology or hair smoothing abilities) to help cut down on frizz, or you may want to opt for a hair dryer brush.
However, if you typically like to embrace your natural curls, a diffuser attachment can be a great way to add some bounce and volume to your hair. In this case it may be worth purchasing a hair dryer that already comes with a diffuser included, like the DevaCurl Dryer & Diffuser Combo.
Fine Hair Thinner hair strands are often the easiest to blow dry as they typically don’t require very high heat settings to get a frizz free result. With that being said, it’s probably best to avoid ionic hair dryers if you have fine hair.
The technology in these dryers can make your smooth strands look a little too sleek, taking away the volume that you were trying to create by blowing out your hair in the first place.
Thick Hair For thick hair, you’ll want a well-rounded blow dryer that can reach higher temperatures (and speeds) to get the job done. One that delivers adequate drying power so you aren’t left with exhausted arms half way through your blow out, like the BaBylissPRO Nano Titanium Dryer (available at Amazon) , is great for fast drying when it comes to long, thick hair.
Jessica writes and edits beauty content as a member of Reviewed's commerce team and manages a beauty TikTok called Beautorial. She's spent four years testing makeup, skincare, hair care, and body care products, and she acts as Reviewed's beauty expert.
Jessica represented Reviewed's beauty section at CES in-person and virtually for four years, and she was nominated for and graduated from the Gannett Emerging Leaders 2021-2022 program.
Jessica holds a Bachelor's degree in journalism from Emerson College, and she's written for Scary Mommy, 7News, Boston.com, Citizine, and Boston Common Magazine.
Sara Miranda
Staff Beauty Writer
Sara Miranda is the Staff Beauty Writer at Reviewed. Her bylines appear in Allure, Bustle, Coveteur, HelloGiggles, and more. She graduated from New York University with a degree in Art History and credits her studies for teaching her how to craft colorful descriptions of the latest and greatest beauty products. Besides writing about all things beauty, she loves going to art galleries, photographing her travels, looking for the best bubble tea, and taking long walks down the aisles of Sephora.
Our team is here for one purpose: to help you buy the best stuff and love what you own. Our writers, editors, and lab technicians obsess over the products we cover to make sure you're confident and satisfied. Have a different opinion about something we recommend? Email us and we'll compare notes.
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