Dyson Launches Cutting-Edge Hair Dryer Supersonic r

Said to be the brand's lightest but most powerful, the machine took 10 years to develop

- Amanda Chai

The hair science laboratory in Dyson is not what you would expect. When visiting the premises at the Singapore Technology Centre (STC) for an exclusive tour, this writer is greeted by racks of real, virgin hair tresses in different textures and ethnicities, like something out of a B-grade horror movie.

Disembodied mannequin heads with various hair types are peppered around the other laboratories. A sullen-looking one named June, sporting a tousled black mop, looks like she has been through the ringer.

The tresses are to test prototypes of hair dryers and tools on real human hair in a controlled environment. Through an automated machine, each lock of hair is carefully wet with deionised water and squeezed dry to simulate towel-drying, then repeatedly passed through the hair device until it reaches its target dryness.

The minutes-long process ends in a high-resolution photo shoot that uses machine learning to objectively quantify hairstyles using an in-house algorithm.

All this for Dyson's latest hair dryer. At 325g and $759, the Supersonic r launched to consumers in Singapore on April 10.

Touted as the brand's lightest but most powerful hair dryer, it is 30 per cent smaller and 20 per cent lighter than the original $600 Supersonic hair dryer first released in 2016. That had marked Dyson's headline-making foray into beauty and was a runaway success for answering a need for a faster way to dry hair without the heat damage.

The lower-case "r" in the successor's name is a nod to the ergonomic machine's gentle curved head.

The Singapore-headquartered global tech giant may be known for its vacuum cleaners, but it takes its burgeoning beauty category no less seriously. Here, haircare is treated like a science, calculated with mathematical precision.