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Each attachment glides smoothly through the hair without tugging or causing knots, and a major bonus is that the dryer head has a special flyaway attachment that quite literally works to vanish flyways in one swoop. If your frizzy hair is proving nigh on impossible to control, rest assured that this hot brush kept most of our panel’s manes beautifully smooth all day. It didn’t take long to heat up either and successfully banished flyaways, but it didn’t add much volume (possibly a good thing if you’ve already got a lot!). You can use hot air stylers on damp or wet hair, but we recommend towel drying first to remove excess water. Hair is more fragile when wet, so styling at high temperatures will not only damage delicate strands, but you probably won't achieve the look you're after either. To turn curly hair into pin-straight strands with a just-right amount of movement, Drybar’s The Brush Crush will be your styling BFF.
Are Hot Air Brushes Bad for Your Hair?
Dafni claims it covers eight times the surface area your regular straighteners can — ideal if you’ve got lots of long hair to get through. Nora is our Beauty and Grooming Tester and has a master's degree in cosmetic science. In the lab she uses a variety of methods such as the Diastron, The Multi Skin Test Centre, The VISIA Complexion Analyser to test anything from hydration, skin barrier function, pore size and more.
Revlon One-Step Volumizer Plus 2.0
She started her post graduate life at Hearst UK within a marketing capacity, which quickly turned into a desire to fulfil a writing career. It proved effective at straightening too, leaving our panel with poker straight strands. Not skimping on smoothness either, most said it left their hair silky and were happy with how fabulously soft their locks felt.
CHI Tourmaline Ceramic Heated Paddle Brush
A hot air brush isn’t effective on extremely short hair, like a buzz cut, because you can’t wrap it around the barrel. If you’re looking for a hot air brush for short hair, you should stick to a 1-inch barrel. Conair’s curling combo is the perfect hot air brush for those with fine hair. Its curling capabilities on fine hair are debatable, but if you want a gentle hot air brush that smoothly gets rid of tangles while styling, this is it. The Dyson Airwrap Complete Styler is a comprehensive hair drying and styling package that works wonders on all hair types. Those with coarse/thick hair need to select a hot air brush with high temperatures for effective drying.
Remington PROluxe You Adaptive Hot Brush
And if you have long hair, then you know how time-consuming it can be to blow out your hair at home. When using a tool like this one that has a wider brush design, you’ll be able to shorten that process a bit without sacrificing beautiful results. Though this tool has a pretty basic design it impressed us in terms of how shiny it makes the hair look. We appreciate that it has three heat settings and it does an excellent job and smoothing and straightening the hair.
How We Tested
Whether you have straight, wavy, or curly hair, this hot air brush gives you a great blowout. The hot brush function has three airflow speeds, along with a cool shot button for setting your style. Our panel loved the smoothing brush that created frizz-free, straight hair with body. Aside from that, there’s barrels to create curls and waves, and it all comes in a stylish storage case. It’s also important to look at the different brush types (and whether or not a hot air brush tool comes with different brush heads).
Hot Air Brush Types
It only features one heat setting, but with a little bit of dry shampoo added to the equation, it’s all you need for some lift and body. Ready to trade in your round brush and blowdryer for an all-in-one tool or want a potentially safer way to straighten with a little more control and lift? The good news is there’s a hot brush here for you, no matter your hair type, budget, or styling goals. To blowout and shape your hair (versus something more akin to flatironing), you’ll want an airflow model. For best results with this particular tool, Rona recommends starting with clean, damp hair (cool to the touch but never dripping wet) and working a spritz or dollop of your favorite heat protectant into your tresses. Brush or comb your hair first to get rid of any stubborn tangles, then section pieces off, passing the hot brush slowly from roots to ends, section by section.
Cost aside, this hot air brush lives up to the hype with six styling attachments that are compatible with hair that is shoulder length or longer and can help you achieve everything from a bouncy blowout to a wavy curl. Hot air brushes with larger brush heads are ideal for those with long hair because long strands will easily wrap around the barrel all the way to the ends. Short hair likely won't wrap fully around the brush head, and therefore it will be harder to achieve flipped ends.
There are two kinds of hot brushes: Ones that use hot air and ones that use a hot plate.
12 best hair dryer brushes to try in 2024 - TODAY
12 best hair dryer brushes to try in 2024.
Posted: Mon, 04 Mar 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]
When styling fine hair, consider the Hot Tools One-Step Pro Blowout Styler, which has boar-tech bristles that grab the hair easily while drying and help create a silky and smooth finish. The brush also has a 24K gold styling surface, which provides even heat distribution and can help protect hair from heat damage, too. While it doesn’t come with all of the attachments that some other stylers have, we found that this one had less of a learning curve and was overall super easy to use, even if you’ve never used a hot air brush before. If you’re new to styling your hair on your own, we recommend checking out this blow-dry brush. Aside from the shape, we also appreciate that this tool helps to reduce frizz, is lightweight and easy to use, and has multiple heat settings.
Luckily, Shark’s Beauty Styling System was designed with waves and loose and tight curls in mind. The multi-styler marries a strong airflow with versatile attachments like a diffuser for full curls and an oval brush for top-tier smoothness. Whether you want a straight and shiny look, or are looking to enhance your natural hair, one of the several attachments will def be creating red carpet-level blowouts in record time. Jessie Quinn is a contributing commerce writer for PEOPLE and has written for publications such as Byrdie, InStyle, The Spruce, NYLON, and more. With a 1.25-inch barrel, Conair’s hot air brush can be used on short hair or long hair. The barrel size also makes it a good option for lightly curling your locks.
As stated above, your hair length also dictates the best barrel size for you. This tool is better used as one of a number of styling steps rather than a solo styler. Unlike the Revlon One-Step, where the mixed bristles are placed all around the oval barrel, the Bed Head One-Step has only hard plastic bristles on the flat side with the mixed bristles on the sides.

This well-sized paddle brush is coated with tourmaline - a semi-precious material that naturally produces negative ions. Trying to achieve a salon-worthy blow-dry, but can’t seem to angle your bristle brush correctly while also holding your dryer? Our testers loved its luxe, professional feel and many reported a ramp-up of body and bounce. It’s lightweight, easy to use, and as with all Ghd products, the temperature is capped at 185 degrees to prevent damage.

Considering the results would vary vastly by different hair types, we took our testing process up a notch to make sure we’re representing all hair types. For every hot air brush, we had a mix of InStyle editors, along with a professional hair stylist and a hair model, for a total of three individuals identifying as type 1, type 2, and type 3 hair, to test each brush. In order to understand what hair category you fall into, you can use the graph below. We’ve outlined our experiences and results below by hair type for you to select the styling tool that best suits your hair type and texture. We also enlisted the help of a number of hair professionals who provided tips on how to achieve salon-esque blowouts for the days you want to look like a 10, while only spending 10 minutes styling. Before that game-changing launch, these heated styling tools had been left largely forgotten, replaced by the staple hairdryer and reliable straightener.
We’ve written many love letters to hot air brushes for their state-of-the-art ability to dry and style our hair in one go, getting us out the door quicker and leaving our strands looking smooth and lustrous. Although these time-saving beauty tools were once novel, there are now dozens of options out there promising to bring us life-changing results. We put 10 of the most popular hot air brushes to the test to determine which ones practiced what they preached. Moreover, hot air brushes use varying materials and technologies to reduce the heat impacting your hair. Ionic technology, different heat settings, and ceramic coatings all ensure that you don’t have to worry about hair damage while styling. This brush is super lightweight, easy-to-use, and leads to stunning hairdos.