The Best Hair Dryers of 2022

The Bio Ionic, our previous Best Overall pick, is a top-notch dryer that exceeded my expectations during the last round of testing when it straightened my hair in about 30 minutes. Even now, it’s a great choice that’ll satisfy you whether you want to blast your hair dry (but not styled) in under 5 minutes or take the time to make it look like a professional blowout. Where this can’t compete with Best Overall BaBylissPro is in price: Despite discounts you may find on it, our current top pick is consistently a fraction of this one’s price while offering a similarly salon-like finish.

In addition to the two power settings, the dryer has three heat settings (high, medium, and cool) one cool shot button, and two nozzle accessories to help control airflow. In my tests, medium heat was my preferred setting and plenty hot enough to style my hair. With these different heat and intensity settings in tow, this hair dryer will work for all different hair types.

The GHD Helios gave our winners a run for their money, receiving a perfect score for its stellar drying performance. I got my hair from soaking wet to damp, though not at all styled, in about 5 minutes toggling between the medium heat and high power settings. In another 15 minutes, I was able to get my hair straight enough to wear out of the house. I’d want to touch up a few of the front pieces with a flat iron, but I was still impressed.

I tested the GHD dryer before the BaBylissPro and was very impressed. The main reason GHD gave me pause is how much more it costs. Ultimately, our Best Overall pick offers a perfect-score-performance for a better price, but I can’t deny that the GHD dryer is a fantastic option for drying and styling.

As for details, this dryer contains switches on the back of the handle, like the Revlon. One toggles between off, low, and high power settings and the other contains low, medium, and high heat settings with a cool shot located just below the barrel.

Devacurl’s hair dryer landed toward the top of our list because it’s comfortable to hold and features a narrow barrel that makes it easier to hone in specific areas of the hair, like the roots.

Like the BaBylissPro, the buttons lay on the inside of the handle, where my thumb instinctively lands, which makes it easier to toggle between the ascending heat and airflow settings while styling. This detail makes it more intuitive to use than other top choices, like the Bio Ionic and Revlon.

This dryer is a fine pick, but did not deliver the same smooth results as our top pick despite performing similarly when it came to air and heat—the maximum temperature this reached is only 1°F cooler than BaBylissPro, for reference.

Drybar is a salon known for its amazing blowouts, so I was curious knowing how its dryer would fare amongst others on this list. My hair was damp but nowhere near soaking when I began drying, as I left it in my microfiber towel for about 15 minutes after my shower. In just a couple minutes, I dried my hair enough to break out a round brush and start styling it straight with the concentrator nozzle. The click-in nozzle took a few attempts to get in place—more effort than I needed with any other dryer—but ultimately locked in fine. In about 20 minutes, I was able to get my hair looking straight enough to wear out, though not as smooth as I’d prefer.

Something that stood out to me with this dryer was that I could touch the dryer barrel and nozzle within a minute of finishing my hair, whereas other dryers feel burny hot and I have to be careful to let it cool before taking off the nozzle and stowing it away.

The Drybar Buttercup has two switches on the inside of the handle—one with three heat options and one with two power settings—giving the same intuitive design as the BaBylissPro and Devacurl.

While blow-drying my hair, I find myself moving the tool back and forth to avoid staying on one spot for too long and irritating my scalp and to keep the air flow moving toward a larger swath of hair. However, this motion can be tiring, which is why Panasonic created its Nanoe Hair Dryer with an attachment that oscillates to perform that action for you. While testing this dryer, I evaluated this feature in addition to its regular ole dryer abilities.

It took me a total of 15 minutes to dry my hair on the low setting—high felt too hot, and heat and airflow can’t be controlled independently here. I chose not to style my hair with this dryer, as I wanted to test its claim of cutting down on drying time using the oscillating nozzle, but I noted that my hair looked “crazy” after the 15 minutes and would require a pass through with a straightener if I wanted to wear it down. Still, I would expect that result with any of these dryers if I didn’t specifically pull my hair taut and try to straighten it, so I don’t fault the dryer. However, with dryers above this one on the list, I was able to bring my hair from wet to semi-damp in about 5 minutes, so Panasonic seems to fall flat in turns of cutting drying time, even factoring in that it got my hair dry, not just semi-damp.

In addition to not helping to cut my drying time down, the oscillating attachment presented some challenges. First, it took me several attempts to figure out how to activate the attachment, despite reading the instructions. (It turned out I was over-complicating it and all I had to do was slide the circular nozzle forward.) Then, the attachment caused my hair to tangle while in motion, though you may not notice this as much if you have silkier hair unlike my textured hair that binds together easily.

Aside from the snags, I liked this dryer fine. It didn’t wow me, but I appreciated the innovative idea that indeed kept my arm from feeling as tired throughout the drying process. All of the controls are also very intuitive, albeit less customizable, with a single switch that toggles among off, low, and high.

The Shark Hyperair looks like a dupe for the double-the-price Dyson Supersonic. It forgoes a long barrel and instead opts for a short, wide one that, like the Dyson, acts as the control center with three buttons for air and three for heat. Both sets of buttons even light up white and red, respectively, like the Dyson.

This landed higher than the Dyson on our list because it felt more comfortable to hold, thanks to its better weight distribution, but I have similar criticisms for both tools. The medium heat and air settings dried my hair in 20 minutes, with the finished ‘do looking semi-straight but poofy. But the higher airflow, even on medium heat, was intense and whipped my hair around at times. Would I use this again? Sure. But given how sleek I could get my hair with other, more affordable options on this list, I wouldn’t spring for it or recommend that you do.

In an earlier round of testing, the Harry Josh was crowned the best hair dryer, as it scored well and was beloved by the tester before me. However, my experience was a poor one.

Harry Josh comes with two concentrator nozzles and has a “negative ion” setting switch that claims smoother styling. Without a nozzle accessory, I struggled to control the dryer’s airflow, which caused my hair to poof up more than any other blow dryer. The nozzle attachment corrects this problem, but that accessory gets burning-hot to the touch, so there’s no taking it off mid-drying session without waiting for it to cool. Another big deterrent for me was the high pitch squeal of this dryer—after I finished, my ears were ringing for 20 minutes, which coincidentally was about the same amount of time it took to dry my hair.

No hair dryer list would be complete without the super-pricey Dyson Supersonic Hair Dryer. Its diminutive but powerful motor lives inside the Supersonic's handle instead of the head, differentiating it from the other models we've tested. The design lends itself to being more balanced and, in theory, more ergonomically pleasant to use. However, placing the motor inside of the handle means an ultra-light barrel that leads to an awkward weight imbalance, most noticeable when I was maneuvering it around my head to dry my roots before moving onto styling.

I liked that the Supersonic's control buttons are located on the head of the dryer as opposed to in its handle and that they light up to show which of the three heat or air settings I’m using. Their placement keeps them from accidentally engaging them while the hair dryer is in use—an issue that some hair dryers suffer from. Its “cool mode” button locks into place so that you don’t have to keep squeezing it to keep it ont—a nice touch if you like to use the function to “set” your hair after styling with hot air. The Supersonic comes with two smoothing nozzles and a diffuser, all of which attach to the hair dryer magnetically in a snap.

I saw poofy but fully dry results after 30 minutes of using the Dyson and a round brush—a little longer than some. While the Supersonic works well enough, there are far less expensive hair dryers that you can invest in that will yield similar, if not better, results.

This low-priced Conair embodies the differences between a high-end dryer and a budget one. It was noticeably heavier, seemed louder, and had a weaker air stream than its competition. Like most of the dryers, it has two speed and three heat settings, but the low speed setting isn’t powerful enough while the high one feels uncontrollable, which led to my hair getting tossed around and looking poofy instead of smooth and straightened. Sure, it’ll dry your hair at a fraction of the price of others, but so will our Best Value pick, which works way better.

I wanted this beautiful dryer to be a star performer like the celebrity hair stylist who branded it, as it’s easily accessible at Target and comes in sleek white-and-gold packaging. Unfortunately, looks are about the best thing it has going for it.

The Kristin Ess dryer fell flat in the lab testing and in my own experience with it. Most notably, the dryer sounded loud, despite measuring at about the same volume as the rest, because of its higher-pitched tone and that made the whole experience offputting. It performed fine in terms of its power, but the thing that made it stand out from the pack was its pitchy tone—in a bad way.

The first thing that stood out about this dryer was its lightweight build. It’s similar in size and shape to the Shark Hyperair, but feels even lighter and looks sleeker with its white and gold exterior. That positive aside, its air flow isn’t powerful enough to stack up with the others on this list. It gently tossed my hair around even at the highest speed and it took me about 28 minutes to get my hair to look semi-straight but it was still damp in some spots and puffier than I’d prefer. I tried it on medium and high heat settings and found the former sufficed but the latter to feel too hot. I’d use this again in a pinch, but its lightweight, attractive design is the most appealing thing about it.

The budget-minded Remington was another dryer that hurt my ears with its high-pitched hum—something I could look past if the performance was superior to others on this list. But it wasn’t: This dried my hair in about 25 minutes with the results straight but not sleek enough, even after I switched both the heat and speed settings from medium to high. And its humdrum performance was not for a lack of heat, either—I felt a big difference between the heat settings, with the medium being about right and the hot one feeling too intense.

The primary positive to this dryer is that it was comfortable to wield. It didn’t feel too heavy and the weight was evenly distributed in the head and the handle. Aside from that one aspect, this dryer was only passable.

This dryer from Hot Tools isn’t bad—it’s just not great, either. It dried my hair in 25 minutes with semi-straight results. Like a few of the ones above it, I’d use it in a pinch, but nothing about its performance, build, or buttons stood out from the pack.