The next big Dyson gadget?

Famous for his bagless vacuum cleaners, British inventor James Dyson’s latest innovation involves a lot of hot air.

Famous for his bagless vacuum cleaners, British inventor James Dyson’s latest innovation involves a lot of hot air.

Which is a good job — because it’s a hairdryer.

For its first foray into health and beauty, his firm has unveiled a £299 hairdryer which it says is up to eight times more powerful than some rivals, while weighing half as much.

It follows a £50 million investment in a new health and beauty design lab at its British headquarters.

The company has developed one version of the Dyson Supersonic for home use and another for salons.

It says the new model is extremely quiet, so stylists will no longer have to shout at the top of their voices to discuss customers’ holiday plans.

Sir James said: ‘Hairdryers can be heavy, inefficient and make a racket. By looking at them further, we realised that they can also cause extreme heat damage to hair.

‘I challenged Dyson engineers to really understand the science of hair and develop our version, which we think solves these problems.’ The dryer, which goes on sale in June, was built with advice from Akin Konizi, four times British hairdresser of the year. He said: ‘Any fully booked stylist will understand the strain that constant blow-drying can put on your body.

‘That’s why the weight, power and balance of this device are really quite revolutionary.’ Dyson says the Supersonic contains its smallest, lightest and most advanced digital motor, which it put in the handle of the machine. The dryer, which forces air from a circular nozzle around the rim of the head, was devised following tests on more than 1,000 miles of hair. Engineers even built test rigs that mechanically simulated hair-drying techniques.