It has cost almost £50 million (€65 million) to develop, taken four years to perfect, gone through 600 prototypes and been tested on more than 1,625km of human hair, but Dyson has finally unveiled its latest product: the Supersonic hair dryer.

The company, which made its name creating bagless vacuum cleaners, has branched out in recent years, making fans and cleaners, hand dryers and taps. The Dyson Supersonic is the company’s first entry into the beauty industry.

Heat damage

“Hair dryers can be heavy, inefficient and make a racket,” said

James Dyson

. “We realised they can also cause extreme heat damage to hair. I challenged Dyson engineers to really understand the science of hair and develop our version of a hair dryer, which we think solves these problems.”

The Supersonic is a smaller, more balanced dryer that uses Dyson’s compact motor technology which is eight-times faster than other hair-dryer motors and is only half the weight. The company built the motor into the handle instead of the head, where traditional hair dryers usually have their motors, and uses temperature controls to try to protect hair from heat damage.

Quieter

The new device not only draws on the company’s digital motor expertise, which has been developed for its vacuum cleaners, but also the technology it created for its fans, which gives it a more powerful, targeted air flow. It has also been engineered as quieter than conventional hair dryers.

Reports that Dyson was building a hair dryer surfaced as long ago as 2013, when patents filed by the company teased the existence of the “hairblade”, which was a quieter, lighter device.

More than 100 engineers worked on the device in the past four years, and it has generated more than 100 patents, currently pending, for the firm.

The Dyson Supersonic is set to go on sale in June for €399.