Credit:
Reviewed / Betsey Goldwasser
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Credit:
Reviewed / Betsey Goldwasser
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A high-quality tool that’s great for sleek styles with intuitive buttons, a wide range of temperature settings, and an audible chime when it’s ready for use. Read More
A bargain flat iron with extra-long plates that results in a salon-quality smooth style. Read More
A quality flat iron with smooth plates and a wide range of heat settings. Read More
A beautiful-looking flat iron that delivers fine results but falls flat with its confusing heat settings. Read More
Our previous Best Overall winner with wide plates that smooth out the hair faster. Read More
Whether you have naturally straight hair that you run a flat iron through post-blowdry to tame flyaways or you have curls you like to change up with a straight ‘do, you need a trusty straightener.
To find the right tool for smooth, sleek locks, we tested a dozen of the most popular and highly rated flat irons on the market. Our extensive review, taking into account heat adjustability, value, ease of use, safety features, button placement, cord length, and much more, led us to the Hot Tools HT7122BG Professional Black Gold Micro-Shine Flat Iron (available at Amazon for $84.99) as the best of the best. It turns curly strands from poofy and coiled to straight and shiny with little effort or visible damage. We were equally impressed with the super-affordable Remington Anti-Static Ceramic Hair Straightener, which has reigned as our budget pick through both my and our previous tester’s testing rounds.
Our Best Overall pick from Hot Tools has intuitive buttons, a wide range of temperature settings, and an audible chime when it’s ready for use.
Our Best Value pick from Remington is a bargain flat iron with extra-long plates that results in a salon-quality smooth style.
The CHI Lava Ceramic Hairstyling Iron won our best for thin hair title due to its ceramic plates.
The T3 SinglePass Strengthening and Styling Iron won the Best for Textured Hair title for its ability to seamlessly straighten our tester's "medium-textured hair."
The Paul Mitchell Neuro Smooth Flat Iron earned our Best for Long Hair title due to the fact that it nicely straightened our tester's long locks.
We found top-rated flat irons with thousands or reviews and pitted them against each other during testing.
Hi, I'm Jessica, the former beauty editor at Reviewed. I’ve been straightening my hair for approximately 10 years—and even longer than that, if you count the phase where my mom gave me blowouts that looked like a flat iron had set my tresses straight. The habit started in middle school when my wavy-straight hair formed into a more concrete curl pattern that I decided wasn’t up to snuff with the style norms of my classmates. And while I do wear my hair in its now wavy-curly natural state often, I blowdry and straighten my hair once a week and keep it for a few days before washing and styling it curly.
When I was in my peak flat-iron days in high school, I sat for about two hours start to finish on a Sunday night and blow dried and straightened my hair for the start of the school week (if only I could get those hours back!), a two-step process that I’ve since replaced with 20 minutes of using the Revlon One-Step Hair Dryer and Volumizer—a star among straightener brushes. But for flat iron testing, I purposefully avoided styling my medium-textured hair with the Revlon blow dryer and only used it to dry my strands, so I could see what these straighteners really had to offer.
Prior to this round of testing, Reviewed’s former beauty and health editor, Jessica Teich, wielded the irons on her own mane, which she describes as "thick, curly hair that I’ve been taming since I could hold a brush."
Before purchasing a flat iron, consider its heat settings first and foremost.
Finding a great flat iron can be a daunting task. There are thousands for sale, varying sizes and claims, and hundreds of brands. We carefully analyzed the market and narrowed our findings down to the most popular flat irons out there. We pitted the best against the best at all prices.
I ran each straightener through my hair in the same way I’ve done for years post-shower and blowdry and attempted to achieve my desired style. I also added heat protectant to prevent further damage to my bleached hair. I took photos and notes that detailed how well and how easily I could get the sleek, straight hair I wanted with that iron.
I then answered questions about:
Heat: How many heat settings does the iron have? How specific can you get with the temperature? How long did each straightener take to heat up? Does it alert you when it’s heated?
Buttons: Are the buttons intuitive? Are the buttons in the way or at risk of being hit during styling?
Build: How durable does the iron feel? How comfortable is it to hold and style with?
Experience: How was the overall experience with the flat iron? Did it give your hair the desired results?
When I completed my portion of testing, I handed the flat irons off to Reviewed’s former senior scientist, Julia MacDougall, who took temperature readings of a sampling of irons on the lowest, middle, and highest heat settings to test for accuracy. Several irons claimed to heat to pizza-baking temperatures of as high as 455°F, which is unnecessary for your hair—but if companies claim it, we test it.
Flat irons have either ceramic or titanium plates, which may not mean anything to you, unless you’ve had a positive experience with one or the other and now prefer one. Titanium flat irons are thought to be better for thicker, coarser hair because they transfer more heat faster and provide negative ions to the hair to neutralize any frizz that comes with texture, while ceramic plates are better for thinner, fragile hair because they evenly distribute the heat throughout your strands to prevent damage. Medium or textured hair can use either, but these are only suggestions and you can use either. For us, the type of plates had no bearing on what we chose to test or how we scored each iron during testing.
When you want to purchase a flat iron, you should not only think about your hair’s texture and density, but how you typically use a straightener. If you don’t have much time for styling and want something that’ll go through your hair quicker, you may want an iron with a larger surface area, which means the plates will be longer (our Best Overall has 4.25-inch plates) and wider (most of the appliances we tested had one-inch wide plates, but many companies make straighteners in up to 2-inch widths). You also want to think about where your nearest outlet is when you style your hair and choose a flat iron with a cord length that’s long enough. (Cords range from six to 11 feet on models in our test.) If you travel a lot, you’ll want one with a sturdy but compact for easier packing. And most of all, you want one that fits comfortably in your hand and is intuitive enough for you to use without even having to look at the instructions. Each flat iron on this list was examined for each of these features in our testing.
Heat, of course, is the most important element of a straightener, and not all of the tools let you set the temperature to a specific degree. In my ideal world, all irons would use buttons to increase the temperature by only about 10 degrees for more precision without overkill (I don’t need to have control over single digits, but I’d like the choice to bump my straightener up or down by small increments). Some of the irons on this list use dials instead of buttons, so you have to leaf through the booklet to find out what temperature corresponds with each setting on the dial. In an even worse case, one of the irons has settings “1” through “5” with temperature ranges of 40 degrees for each setting, which allows even less temperature flexibility.
What we found is that the irons easily reached their lowest settings, in the 200°F range, but then shot past those, meaning your hair may be exposed to more heat than what you intend. However, the readings were accurate at the middle ranges around 330°F, and none of the irons we heat tested reached the maximum of 450°F. What we learned from this is that you should take the temperature value with a grain of salt and plan to read the instruction booklet to find out what the company recommends for your hair type. For example, I use the mid-range heat settings on my medium hair, but someone with very fragile hair should start way lower.
You should also start at a temperature lower than what you think you may need and then go up from there if you find that it’s not hot enough to straighten your hair to your satisfaction. If you start at a lower temperature and have to hold the iron to your hair for longer than, say, 10 seconds, you should bump up to the next temperature, as less time under the heat is better for your hair in the long run.
Cordless
Durable
Expensive
Heavy
Uncomfortable to hold
Heats up quickly
Not great for smoothing curly or wavy hair
Not comfortable to use
Intuitive
Heavy
Large
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.
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