Buy the Dyson Airwrap multi-styler if you style damp hair more than twice a week and you want curls, waves and volume without ever clamping a hot barrel around your hair. It dries and styles in one pass using airflow rather than extreme heat, and on fine to medium hair the result holds better than a curling iron does. If that description sounds appealing but the price does not, the Shark FlexStyle runs the same Coanda airflow trick for a fraction of the money and gets you most of the way there. And if what you want at the end of it is a glass-straight salon finish, the Airwrap was never the tool for that job; the splurge pick is. Here is the whole argument.
The verdict, up front
You style damp hair several times a week, you want dryer and curler in one machine, and you’re done with heat damage from a hot barrel
You want the same auto-wrap curl and a strong dryer, and you’d rather find out whether you’ll keep using it before spending Dyson money
You want a sleek, salon-flat finish rather than curls, and you’d rather go straight from soaking wet to styled with a professional tool
What the Dyson Airwrap actually is
It’s a dryer with a motor strong enough to do something odd. Push air fast enough along a curved surface and the stream clings to that curve instead of flying off it, dragging whatever is nearby along with it. That’s the Coanda effect, and it’s the entire premise of this machine: you hold a section of hair near the barrel, the airflow catches it, and the hair wraps itself. You never twist your wrist and you never clamp anything.
The barrel does warm up, but the styling is being done by moving air, not by a plate pressed against your cuticle. A sensor reads the air temperature more than forty times a second and keeps it under 302F, which is well below where a flat iron sits. Curls set as the damp hair dries in position, the same way rollers work, so what holds the shape is the drying, not the scorching.
Worth being precise about which Dyson this is, because the lineup confuses people constantly. The multi-styler is the one with interchangeable barrels and brushes: it curls, smooths, volumises and dries. The Airstrait is a different machine that straightens from wet, and the Supersonic only dries.
Does it actually work?
Yes, on the hair it was built for, and better than it has any right to.
The volume is the part that surprises people. Because you’re drying hair in a shaped position rather than pressing it flat, roots lift and the whole head looks thicker than it does after a blow dry. Curls come out soft rather than springy, and they hold on fine hair that normally refuses to keep a shape. The absence of a hot clamp shows up over months rather than days: less breakage through the mid-lengths, fewer frazzled ends.
The honest limits are real, though. It’s not a straightener. The smoothing brushes get you sleek and polished, not glass-flat, and on coarse or very curly hair you’ll still want an iron for a truly straight finish. It’s loud, it’s heavier in the hand than it looks in the advertising, and there’s a genuine learning curve of a week or two before your results stop being uneven. Long, thick hair takes considerably longer than the marketing implies. And if you’re after a soft undone texture rather than defined curls, you may find the airflow overkill; a night of beach waves without heat costs nothing and gets closer to that look.
Pros and cons
Pros
- Styles with airflow, so no plate or clamp ever touches your hair
- Dryer, curler, smoother and volumiser in one body
- Excellent root volume on fine hair that normally falls flat
- Air temperature is capped, which spares the cuticle over the long run
Cons
- Expensive for a hair tool, and it rarely discounts much
- Won’t deliver a pin-straight finish; coarse and coily hair still needs an iron
- Only works in a narrow damp window, so the prep is non-negotiable
- Loud, hand-heavy, slow on thick hair, and the filter needs regular cleaning
Who it’s for
Buy it if
Buy it if styling is a routine rather than an occasion. The machine earns its money on repetition: if you’re drying and shaping your hair three or four mornings a week, it replaces a dryer, a round brush and a curling iron, and it does the job in one pass instead of two. It suits fine to medium hair best, and it’s the strongest argument going for anyone alternating between heat damage and a flat, sad ponytail. If you’ve already found that heat-free methods leave you flat, our guide to building root volume in fine hair pairs well with the volumising brush.
Skip it if
Skip this one if your hair is very coarse, tightly coiled or waist-length and heavy, because airflow alone struggles to hold that much weight in a curl and you’ll be happier with a proper iron. Skip it too if you wash and style once a week, or if you’ve never enjoyed the twenty minutes a blowout takes. The reason so many of these end up on resale sites isn’t that the tool disappoints. It’s that the routine never stuck.
How to use it
The gap between people who love this machine and people who call it overrated is almost entirely technique.
Get your hair to about 80 percent dry first. Not soaking, not bone dry. Soaking hair won’t wrap and won’t hold; dry hair slides off the barrel and refuses to catch at all. Rough dry with the drying attachment until it feels cool and barely damp, then start styling. This one step fixes the majority of complaints.
Work in small sections. Roughly an inch and a half wide, no thicker than two fingers. A fat section dries only on the outside, and a curl still damp underneath falls out before you finish the other side of your head.
Let the airflow do the wrapping. Hold the ends a few inches from the barrel and wait for the machine to grab them, then travel up toward your roots. Don’t twist. If your hair fights the barrel, your section is too big or your hair is too wet.
Cool shot, then set. Fifteen seconds of warm air, then the cold shot for another ten. Slide the curl off, drop it into your palm and pin it while it cools if you want it to last past the afternoon. Curls set in a coiled shape hold hours longer than curls you shake out immediately.
One piece of maintenance nobody mentions at the register: clean the filter. A clogged filter starves the motor, the airflow weakens, and the machine quietly stops working as well as it did while you blame your hair. For more on how this fits a whole week of styling, see our everyday hair styling guide.
The dupe: Shark FlexStyle
The Shark FlexStyle Air Styling & Drying System is a dupe in the strict sense, not the marketing sense. It uses the same Coanda auto-wrap curlers: air pulls the section onto the barrel and wraps it, no twisting, exactly the mechanism the Dyson made famous. The body bends in the middle so it converts from styler to a straightforward dryer, and its airflow is arguably stronger than the Dyson’s, which makes the rough-drying stage quicker.
What you give up is refinement. The curlers come as a pair, one wrapping each direction, so you swap attachments to alternate curls. It runs louder, it feels less balanced in the hand, and the smoothing brushes are a step down. On slippery fine hair the Dyson holds a curl a beat longer.
For a large share of readers this is the correct purchase and the Dyson is the indulgence. Buy the Shark, use it for two months, and you’ll learn something no review can tell you: whether you’re a person who styles their hair on a Tuesday. If the answer is yes, upgrade then.
The splurge: ghd Duet Style
Say the honest thing first: there is nothing in this category to trade up to. The Airwrap sits at the ceiling of what a consumer styling tool costs, and every serious rival, ghd, Shark, T3, sells for less. So the splurge here isn’t a bigger number. It’s buying the same job in professional form, from the house that has been the salon standard for two decades.
The ghd Duet Style 2-in-1 Hot Air Styler is a flat iron with air moving through the plates, so it takes hair from soaking wet to finished in a single pass, then works on dry hair as a straightener afterwards. That’s the thing the Airwrap can’t do in this job. Airflow alone gets you sleek and polished; it does not get you glass-flat, and it needs that fussy 80 percent damp window before it will grip at all. The ghd skips the window entirely and lands the finish the Airwrap only approximates.
Buy it instead of the Airwrap if your ideal hair is straight, shiny and behaved rather than curled or lifted. Buy it as well as the Airwrap only if you genuinely want both looks, because between them they cover the whole board, and either one alone leaves half of it uncovered.
FAQ
Does the Airwrap damage your hair?
Far less than a curling iron or flat iron, because nothing hot is clamped against the hair shaft and the air temperature stays capped under 302F. It isn’t heat-free, so a heat protectant is still sensible, but the trade compared with daily iron use is a favourable one.
Why won’t my hair wrap around the barrel?
Almost always moisture. Hair that’s too dry won’t catch the airflow, and hair that’s too wet is too heavy to lift. Aim for around 80 percent dry, take smaller sections, and hold the ends closer to the barrel until it grabs them.
Is the Shark FlexStyle really as good?
On the core curling mechanism, close enough that the difference is a preference rather than a gap. Where the Dyson pulls ahead is noise, balance, the quality of the smoothing brushes and a slightly longer curl hold on fine hair. At a third of the price, that’s a reasonable place to land.
How long do the curls last?
A day on fine hair, longer on thicker or textured hair, and considerably longer if you pin each curl while it cools and finish with a light spray. Shaking them out the second they leave the barrel is the fastest way to lose them.
How we picked
A dupe has to work the way the hero works, so the Shark qualified on mechanism: Coanda auto-wrap curlers that pull hair onto the barrel with airflow, not a heated barrel making a similar claim. Nothing in the category costs more than the Airwrap, so the splurge slot went to the professional-grade answer instead: the ghd delivers the pin-straight, wet-to-finished result airflow alone can’t. We weighted independent long-term reviews, hair-type-specific reports and salon use over brand copy.
Bottom line
Buy the Dyson Airwrap multi-styler if you style damp hair several times a week and want one machine that dries, curls, smooths and lifts your roots without a hot clamp. It’s a lot of money for a hair tool and it’s still the best version of this idea. Dupe it with the Shark FlexStyle if you aren’t yet certain you’ll use it often enough to justify the Dyson, because the underlying trick is the same. Splurge on the ghd Duet Style if what you want is sleek rather than curled; nothing in this category costs more than the Airwrap, so the trade-up is professional form, not a bigger price.
It loses half a point for the learning curve and for being useless on soaking or bone-dry hair, both of which the box does not warn you about. More honest verdicts live in our Buy, Dupe, or Splurge archive, and the rest of our styling coverage sits in Hair.
