This Cult Fave Hair Styler is Worth the Hype
If you follow beauty news with any regularity you have probably heard of the cult-fave Revlon One Step Hair Dryer and Volumizer. It’s a massive brush, but with a hairdryer held within, and you use it to essentially brush your hair dry, in the hopes of getting a salon blowout look, but at home and in about 10 minutes. I have wanted one for years, and never got one because while I am forever charmed by literally any beauty gimmick, I’m also a shrewd shopper and I just wasn’t sure about the hype. And then a few weeks ago I said, “Oh who CARES” and bought a Revlon One Step Hair Dryer and Volumizer of my own and wouldn’t you know it: It’s amazing.
There are many caveats to this claim, but I’ll get to those later. First let’s talk specs. This thing is like an enormous brush… that has hot air coming out of it. It’s huge and loud and heavy. BUT, it’s a great way for a hair style nincompoop like me to get nice looking hair. The brush has both plastic bristles AND boar bristles, so it really grips the hair as you run it through. The cord rotates, so you don’t have to stop and untangle yourself as you go. It has a giant oval shape, so you get more surface area to dry your hair. The controls are on the base of the brush, right next to the cord, and you just rotate the bottom to switch between hot, low, cool, and off. It’s really well designed, affordable, and best of all, it works as advertised.
I mentioned that this thing is loud and heavy, which it is. I think it’s not impossible to use, but the first time I tried it out I was very glad that I regularly lift weights. It probably weighs like, 3lbs? but holding 3lbs over your head, while maneuvering it all around? That adds up and can get tiring. The loudness isn’t a huge deal - if anyone else is in the house I use it in the bathroom with the door closed - but I wouldn’t use this say, right after I finally got a cranky baby to sleep.
I tend to separate my hair into a top and bottom section, pinning the top up while I first dry the bottom, then do the top bit. I’ve also tried this without separating and it doesn’t really make a difference, apart from making it easier to tell what hair has been dried and what has yet to be done. I also have a hard time getting the crown of my head dry, so I flip my hair over and do the crown (and sometimes the hair at the very back and base of my neck, while hanging my head upside down. Even with all these various maneuvers, I have always been able to go from soaking wet hair to dried and styled hair in 10 minutes or less.
I will also add, as someone who has stalked this contraption online for years, you should NOT pay more than $40 for this thing. The MSRP is $60, but it’s almost always available somewhere for $40, and when I finally bit the bullet and bought one it was $35 at Target and on Amazon. And if you want to see a tutorial, or see this drying brush compared to others, YouTube is a great resource. I watched two videos about it, one comparing it to the Dyson Air Wrap, and now I’m bombarded with videos about hair tools. But the main consensus of the videos I watched is this: For $35 and 10 minutes (plus a bit of upper body strength) you can look like you got your hair blown out by a professional - without leaving your home.
