Dyson launches Supersonic hair dryer, letting people use its bladeless fans to style their hair for £299

The new hair dryer looks little like previous hair dryers, with none of the long top that usually sits at the top of them, and costs a lot more than previous models too

Dyson has released its latest product: a hair dryer.

The company best known for vacuums and then fans has turned that same technology onto people’s heads, releasing a new hair dryer that looks a little like its bladeless fan heaters.

As with many of Dyson's products, customers will have to pay up for the hair dryer's striking design. It will cost £299 when it launches in the UK later this year – twice that of salon-grade hair dryers from competing companies.

The new Supersonic looks like a long stick with a tiny version of those fans at the top. That means that it avoids the usual gun-like design of other hair dryers, instead going straight up – and, according to Dyson, being much easier to control.

It says that the relatively expensive piece of kit will allow people to dry their hair more comfortably and with more control, and also avoid problems with previous technology like overheating and the problem of getting hair trapped in them.

“Hair dryers can be heavy, inefficient and make a racket,” said James Dyson, the company’s founder. “By looking at them further we realised that they can also cause extreme heat damage to hair.

“I challenged Dyson engineers to really understand the science of hair and develop our version of a hair dryer, which we think solves these problems.”

Dyson says that since the hair dryer uses its small but strong and fast motors, which is mounted in the handle, it has been able to vastly shrink the usual size of a hair dryer. It has also designed that motor to make much less noise, by pushing the tone of the motor above the range heard by humans and so giving the product its name.

The Supersonic will initially launch in Asia, but will come to the UK in June. It will sell for around £299.

Dyson said that it has been developing the hair dryer for four years, and spent almost £50 million on creating it. That process has used up 1010 miles of human hair for testing, it said.