I’ve reviewed plenty of Dyson Airwrap alternatives, but the one I was most excited to try out was the Dreame AirStyle Pro. Dreame is a relatively new brand, but is rapidly establishing itself as a key player in the home appliances space.
We’ve tested a number of its products in different categories, and they’ve consistently impressed us – the Dreame R20 sits at the top of our best cordless vacuum guide, and its X50 Ultra Complete is our favorite premium robot vacuum. And that’s just a couple of examples.
So my expectations for the AirStyle were high. I’d seen it demoed at a press event, my teammate had tried it out briefly at IFA and loved it, and when my test sample arrived my first impressions were great. I thought it was a shoo-in for my best hair styler roundup.
Let’s start with the good bits. The dryer part is well-designed – it’s comfortable to hold, well-balanced, and looks and feels high quality. The controls are intuitively placed and out-of-the-way enough that it’s unlikely you’ll press them accidentally, and the spring-loaded slider cool shot is especially well thought-out.
There’s a great range of attachments, including those all-important auto-wrapping curl barrels (the innovation that made the original Airwrap so popular), and three different brushes for smoothing and volumizing.
Dreame has also added a Flyaway attachment (positioned to rival the one included with the Dyson Airwrap i.d.) and a smart-looking Fast dry attachment that blasts the air out at a right-angle to the handle, for comfortable drying. All are packaged up neatly in a stylish storage box.
The price is right too: it’s still a bit of an investment, but almost exactly the same as its main Airwrap-alike competitor, the Shark FlexStyle.
What’s the problem?
So far, so good – so why did the Dreame AirStyle Pro end up being the biggest disappointment of my product reviewing year? The first (and most significant) problem is that it just doesn’t get hot enough.
I don’t have especially long or thick hair (collarbone-length, and fine strands but quite a lot of them, for the record), but it couldn’t get it dry. I spent several minutes waving the AirStyle ineffectually around my head before giving up and switching to a dedicated hair dryer – I just don’t have that kind of time available in the mornings, okay?
It was so lukewarm that I wondered if I’d been sent a faulty review model, but not so – looking at Dreame’s website reveals the two heat settings as 122ºF / 50ºC (medium) and 176ºF / 80ºC (high). In comparison, the Dyson Airwrap i.d.’s maximum heat setting is 194ºF / 90ºC.
The lack of heat is frustrating when you’re in a rush and need to dry your hair efficiently, but it has a bigger problem for this kind of styler, too. You need a certain amount of initial heat to ‘set’ styles, and I found my curls seemed to drop much more quickly when created using the AirStyle versus other auto-wrap curlers I’ve tested – even cheap ones like the Revamp Dynamic Radiance Pro.
The second problem is that the tools don’t attach securely enough. It’s a simple twist mechanism, with no ‘click’ and no release switch. That’s fine for something like the Fast dryer attachment, but with brush tools that require twisting as part of the styling process, I fairly regularly ended up with a dryer in hand and a brush hanging tangled in my hair.
Despite these frustrations, I’m hesitant to give up on Dreame’s multistyler just yet. It just has so much promise. When (or if – nothing is confirmed yet) a new version arrives, I just hope these two problems will have been addressed.