Dyson, the British company known for its high-powered vacuum cleaners (and equally high-powered rows with the European Union) is now working on a “high-velocity” hairbrush that will cut even more time off the morning battle with wet hair.
According to the Evening Standard, Dyson has lodged patents with the U.K.’s Intellectual Property Office for a “mains-powered, baton-shaped device, featuring a fan heater to fire hot or cold air into the hair.” The IPO’s documents call it “a hot styling brush with a handle and a detachable head.”
The brush could be an alternative for those who didn’t like the idea of dropping $400 on the “Supersonic” hairdryer that Dyson launched last year (on the admittedly heroic assumption that Dyson will price the brush any more charitably when the time comes to market it).
The brush is designed to drain away excess fluid along two tubular ‘walls’ that increase drying speed and help to align individual hair strands. The baton handle, meanwhile, contains a fan unit which ‘draws fluid in’ and away from the hand holding the brush.
“The appliance can be used with or without a heater, the action of the outflow of fluid at high velocity has a drying effect,” the Standard quoted the documents as saying.
In other words, depending on the situation, you may not even need a hairdryer. The significance of freeing up a hand for essential tea- or social media-related tasks obviously needs no spelling out.
Well, maybe. In the interests of full disclosure, anyone who feels inclined to take this writer’s views on hairstyling should first check out his photo-byline.
Either way, it seems that more beauty-related products will be in the Dyson pipeline before too long.
“We’re quite open about the fact that we have a new category at Dyson called Personal Care,” says a Dyson spokesman. At present, the Supersonic hairdryer is the only product in that category. But The spokesman noted that the company was “overwhelmed” and “humbled” by the response to the Supersonic from the public and the beauty industry.
Henderson declined to comment on the outlook for the high-velocity brush, saying only that the company files around 450 patent applications a year, and that many don’t get developed commercially.