List Price: $250.00
Sale Price: $225.00
Today's Bonus: 10% Off
I bought this a bit cheaper on eBay, but as far as I can tell it's the exact same product. It's a pity that Amazon lists the various colors of the product as separate products rather than one product that comes in different colors. This way, reviews end up scattered around the various listings. But I got the white one, so I'll review the white one.
So here is the question I'm sure everybody is waiting for: Why on earth would I want to spend this much money on a hair dryer?
First of all, I did not spend quite as much as the list price here, since as I mentioned I bought elsewhere for a good discount. But even with a good discount, this hair dryer is expensive. A good consumer grade hair dryer is usually more in the $20-50 range.
Well, let's start at the beginning. I hate hairdryers, because they take forever. Sure, I like the idea of drying my hair with a hairdryer. It makes it nice and smooth, and you get to dry it as you are putting in product, rather than haphazardly directing the product in the general direction of still wet hair and hoping that once it all dries up the product will cause the result to look better than it would have without. But at the same time, I'm busy (or, if you prefer, lazy.) Usually, my sloth wins out over my vanity, and I just towel dry my hair and get on with things. Then, one day, when I was a little bored, I decided to actually give some thought to these problems that had been going rumbling about in the furthest recesses of my brain for years. Is there a better way?
It soon dawned on me that when you get your hair cut, they often wash it before and dry it afterwards. And they often dry it remarkably quickly. I had always assumed that this was because the hair had already had a chance to air-dry a bit while being cut, but this kind of thing called for a bit more research. How much power do hair dryers actually put out? What kinds of hairdryers do professional hairdressers use? How much power do those put out?
As a matter of fact, the research turned out to be very simple. There was no need to experiment. All the information was readily available online. As it turns out, the main variables to consider in a hair dryer is how hard it blows, and how hot. More air per minute means faster drying, and so does a higher temperature. The power usage in Watts of a given hair dryer is a decent indicator of how effective a hair dryer will be, but it is not perfect. It turns out to be easier (read: cheaper) to increase the power of a hairdryer by increasing temperature rather than volume, but that is not actually what you want. There is a practical limit to how hot you can make the air coming out of a dryer. If it is too hot, it hurts the scalp. (I don't mean that it causes some cosmetic damage to watch out for. I mean it _hurts_.) Also, the consensus seems to be that too high a temperature with not enough volume of air causes the hair to dry in a way that makes it frizzy. (The details don't really matter to me, but it's explained in several places on the web.) So a good hair dryer has a lot of power, but also, it allocates a good amount of that power to blowing harder and not just heating up the air to a higher temperature.
Then there is the ionic business. The amount of pseudoscience being bandied about on that topic is too large to dig through; I suspect that all that's going on is that by putting a slight electrostatic charge of the same sign on every hair, the hairs repel each other a little, leading to a smoother, more even look. But maybe there's more to it. Google around and you will found pages of theories about the endless benefits of ions.
Anyway, armed with this background knowledge, the obvious next step is to ask where professionals buy their blow dryers. I soon found out that most brands market themselves pretty much exclusively to professionals or exclusively to retail customers. The professional brands are often European or American, rather than East Asian, in origin, and prices are of course higher. From what I could find, Parlux appeared to be clearly one of the most desirable brands. Everybody writes the same thing about these things: they are solidly built, and they put out a very high volume of very hot air to quickly and smoothly dry hair. Moreover, unlike other pro-oriented brands, Parlux actually has a compact model, which is the one you are looking at now.
Based on all that, I decided to go for it. Sure, it's a lot of money, but if I was going to buy a _good_ hair dryer, I was going to buy a _really_ good one, not one that was better than the old one but not quite adequate and that would end up having to be replaced yet _again_ later. This hair dryer is clearly the Cadillac among hair dryers. Or, maybe, given it's size, we should say it's the BMW 3-series: very high quality, but compact.
All right, so enough with the suspense. What is it actually like to use?
The first thing that struck me about the Parlux is how solidly built it is. The design is elegant and as pretty to behold as a handheld electric motor and heating element are going to get, but once you hold it, it exudes quality. The dryer as a whole is surprisingly heavy, though not so heavy as to be hard to handle for a person of normal strength. The selection switches for setting the temperature and fan speed are clearly of a very high quality, designed to be flipped many times daily for many years in a busy salon setting. The air filter on the back, which comes off for cleaning, has a very tight and precise screw fit.
Actually using the dryer, you notice that the maximum temperature is precisely the highest temperature that you can comfortably use, and it is reached virtually immediately when you turn the heat on. The volume of air put out by the fan is enormous. In terms of drying speed, this is not an incremental improvement over the $40 consumer-grade device I used to have. This is a whole different experience. My (admittedly not very long, and thoroughly towel-dried) hair was dry within a minute or two, and came out very soft and smooth virtually immediately.
It is up to you whether you want to spend this sort of money to get a really good blow dryer. When making your decision whether to buy it, I think you can reasonably assume that this is about as good as a blow dryer is going to get. The question is not whether this product is good enough; it is whether that is worth the money, which only you can decide.
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