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In a sea of hair dryers, the lightweight Beauty Works Aeris digital hair dryer stands out with its extraordinary design, digital display and impressive performance. It combines fast drying with a smooth finish without sacrificing volume or health. However, this is an expensive kit that falls a little short of the brand’s claims and its price will put many people off.
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Beauty Works has become synonymous with its styling wands, curling irons and curling irons, but with the launch of Aeris, the British brand is making its first foray into the hair dryer market. Aeris takes its name from the Latin word for “air” and with its “precise high-velocity airflow” combined with advanced ion technology, it is said to provide a smooth, frizz-free finish with an extremely low breakage rate, guaranteeing fast drying speeds and a digital temperature display.
In our testing, the dryer didn’t quite live up to the advertised specifications given by Beauty Works. However, it dries impressively quickly without losing volume or tangling hair, leaving it smooth. We wouldn’t say it provides a total absence of frizz, but there is noticeably less tangle, which is rare for our naturally curly hair.
The model also stands out for having a digital display, which, while a nice gimmick, feels a little overkill. While it’s interesting to see what temperatures are reached at different settings, there’s no way to tweak them – certainly not in the way Beauty Works’ marketing leads you to believe. So after the first few uses of the hair dryer, we hardly noticed this feature.
We don’t like the look of the Aeris – its industrial shape is a little belittled by the elegant white and gold finish – but it’s a lightweight and well-balanced dryer. This makes it convenient to use and also great for travel.
The magnetic attachments that come standard with Aeris hair dryers – styling concentrators and smoothing attachments – are easy to install and remove, helping to add variety to the hairstyles you can create with Aeris. The diffuser, sold separately, works well, but its general shape and position when connected to the dryer makes it awkward to use.
Aeris is best suited for those who are on a tight budget and want salon results with minimal effort. This will benefit most people with irregular hair, who often find it difficult to achieve smooth results with a conventional blow dryer.
Although this is a new product and often limited availability, the Beauty Works Aeris hair dryer is sold worldwide through Beauty Works’ own website(opens in a new tab), as well as through many third party retailers. In fact, Aeris can be purchased directly in over 190 countries through Beauty Works’ international shipping service. It is also available from many third party UK retailers including Lookfantastic(opens in a new tab), ASOS(opens in a new tab) and Feelunique(opens in a new tab).
Priced at £180 / $260 / AU$315, the Aeris is not only the most expensive hairdressing tool Beauty Works sells, it’s also one of the most expensive hair dryers on the market. That’s three times the price of mid-range hair dryers like BaByliss, especially the PRO range, and on par with some of the more expensive models in our best hair dryer guide. It’s £179 / $279 / AU$330 GHD Helios, but that’s about half the price of a Dyson supersonic dryer at £349.99 / $429.99 / AU$599.99.
To justify this relatively high price, Beauty Works notes that the 1200W Aeris brushless digital motor is 6 times faster than conventional hair dryers and produces 10 times more ions than conventional ion hair dryers. Faster drying times are expected to limit the amount of heat damage your hair receives, while increasing the amount of ions will help make your hair smooth and reduce frizz.
In addition, the Beauty Works Aeris comes with a digital display that is said to offer customizable temperature control – though we quickly found out that the display was nothing more than a gimmick. On the other hand, the Aeris is lightweight and manages to cram a lot of advanced technology into a device that weighs just 300 grams.
Aeris is currently only available in one color – white and gold. It comes with two magnetic attachments: a smoothing attachment and a styling concentrator; you can buy the diffuser separately for £25/$37/AU$44.
The design of the Beauty Works Aeris is more industrial than many of its competitors as it replaces the traditional big curves with straight, sleek lines. Our first impression was that it looked more like a drill than a hair dryer, and the exposed motor design at the back of the barrel highlights that industrial aesthetic. This contrasts with the elegant white and gold color scheme, which is quite stylistically inconsistent. Both attachments feature heat shield technology, which means you can easily replace them without having to wait for them to cool down.
Aeris is compact in size. It comes with an 8-foot (3-meter) cable, which is the standard for most stylists today. The barrel itself measures 7.5 inches (19 cm) and extends to 9.5 inches (24 cm) with a magnetic attachment, and the handle is 4.75 inches (10.5 cm) long. We expected this body-to-handle ratio to upset the dryer’s balance when styling, but the opposite is true. The Aeris is well balanced at 10.5 oz (300 grams), which is noticeably lighter than other dryers we’ve tested: 1 lb 11 oz (780 g) for the GHD Helios and 1 lb 3 oz (560 g) for the dryer. Dyson Supersonic. This makes the Aeris a handy dryer and travel-friendly.
The 4.5″ (10.5cm) circumference makes the slim handle easy to grip and move around, and on the side you’ll find the power button, speed and temperature control button. You must hold the power button for about three seconds to turn on the Aeris. You can then switch between three speed settings: soft, medium, and high, and four temperature settings: cold, low, medium, and high.
The buttons are conveniently located so you can switch between settings to suit your style while avoiding accidental half-empty presses. There’s also a cool fire button, just below the grip, near where the grip meets the barrel. This will set the overall temperature to five. You can check the exact temperature of the setting you are using by looking at the digital display located on the top of the barrel. However, while this can be fun, it does feel like a bit of a gimmick.
It may take some experimentation when using to find the best speed and temperature for your personal hair type and the style you want to create. Luckily, Aeris’ Smart Memory feature means that every time you turn on the dryer, the dryer remembers your previous settings. Beauty Works recommends that those with fine, brittle hair stick to a low temperature of 140°F/60°C. Normal fine hair works best at medium temperature, 194°F / 90°C, while coarse/resistant hair works best at high settings, 248°F / 120°C. The Cool mode works at room temperature and is suitable for all hair types.
The brushless motor at the rear of the barrel is covered by a removable air vent. Beauty Works claims the motor is self-cleaning, but since it’s removable, you can also manually remove stuck dust or hair, as this can affect the dryer’s performance.
The main difference between the brushed motor on older, cheaper hair dryers and the brushless motor on the Aeris is that the brushless motor is electronically driven rather than mechanically. This makes them more energy efficient, powerful and quiet to use, and less prone to wear as quickly as brushed models. In fact, the Aeris is one of the quietest hair dryers we’ve ever used. We can even hear our music playing when we style our hair, which is pretty rare.
Elsewhere, to deliver the promised ionic effect, the front of the Aeris barrel is covered in a circular metal mesh that generates 30 to 50 million negative ions when heated. These ions are then blown into the hair, where they naturally attach to the positive charge of each hair follicle, reducing static and tangling.
Our expectations were high given Beauty Works’ many commitments in drying speed, individual temperature control and advanced ion technology. Luckily we weren’t too disappointed.
When we roughly dried our shoulder-length fine hair straight out of the shower, it went from wet to dry in an average of 2 minutes and 3 seconds. That’s 3 seconds faster than the average Dyson Supersonic dry time. It was also almost a minute faster than the GHD Air, but 16 seconds slower than the GHD Helios. Of course, if your hair is longer and thicker, the drying time may be longer.
The increase in speed becomes even more significant when comparing Aeris drying times to cheaper models, which in our experience can vary from 4 to 7 minutes depending on the model. It’s not the 6x drying speed that Beauty Works promises; however, we can confirm that the Aeris is a fast dryer and if you have only ever used the cheaper model for this dryer, using the Aeris is a huge time saver.
Using the styling concentrator and the Aeris smoothing brush while drying, the total drying time increased to an average of 3 minutes and 8 seconds – not a huge increase, but worth noting.
Another point to consider is that while the drying time doesn’t outperform the competition, Aeris does live up to its claims of smoother, tangle-free hair, especially when using the smoothing attachment. Our hair is naturally curly, but most of the time it is straight. Rarely can we rough dry our hair without using a straightener to get rid of frizz. Not only did the Aeris hair dryer give us smoother results – it wasn’t completely frizz-free, it improved a lot – but it kept our hair’s volume and elasticity. The latter has been a common complaint with other quick dry stylers, but not with the Aeris.
Styling concentrators are best used to create more targeted and direct airflow. This is especially useful when creating bouncy hair dryers instead of rough drying. The smoothing attachment can be used to dry hair similarly to the styling concentrator, but we got the best results from this attachment when we set the Aeris to cold (using the cold air button) and tamed it with the smoothing attachment once. dried hair will fly away.
The diffuser is the most difficult accessory to use. It also looks cheap. Its long, tapered tip allows for greater precision and control when defining and styling curls, but the size of the body and the angle at which the diffuser attaches to the main unit make it a little awkward to use despite the dryer’s small size.
As mentioned, while the digital display is a nice touch, we don’t think it benefits the Aeris dryer. It’s interesting to know what temperature each setting works at, but we usually always blow-dry our hair on a medium setting – the Aeris is no different. If anything, the digital digital display does more than help.
Aeris effortlessly creates smooth, sleek styling, perfect for times where regular blow dryers often make your hair unmanageable.
While the Aeris offers a lot of performance benefits, it doesn’t offer many extra features to justify the higher price.
The industrial shape of the Aeris contrasts with the typically curved and soft design of its competitors. It won’t be to everyone’s taste.
Victoria Woollaston is a freelance tech journalist with over a decade of experience writing for Wired UK, Alphr, Expert Review, TechRadar, Shortlist and The Sunday Times. She has a keen interest in next generation technologies and their potential to revolutionize the way we live and work.
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Post time: Nov-09-2022