I tested the new AI-enabled Dyson Airwrap i.d. on my super damaged hair — the results shocked me

I had an absolute blast testing and reviewing the new Dyson Airwrap i.d. — no pun intended, although there’s definitely room for one there. Considering I have uber-damaged, uber-frizzy hair (sorry for spending three years perming you, and bleaching you for five years before that), I didn’t think the Airwrap i.d. would be able to teach me to love my locks again.

How wrong I was. The Airwrap i.d. is the newest iteration of the cult classic hair styling tool, and it’s different in a few integral ways. For starters, the i.d. has an AI-auto-hair-curling setting: it basically links to your phone via Bluetooth and you can program it to automatically curl your hair.

Obviously it doesn’t have hands, so you have to do the holding, but you don’t have to change temperature or fan speed once each strand is on the curling barrel.

Although I didn’t necessarily gravitate towards the new conical curling barrel, I appreciate that it allows you to achieve tighter curls than before. There’s also a new smoothing brush and diffuser, if you so please.

So, is the Dyson Airwrap i.d. worth the eye-watering $600 price tag? Well… yes, but let me walk you through everything on offer in this comprehensive Dyson Airwrap i.d. review.

Dyson Airwrap i.d. review: Cheat sheet

• What is it? The newest member of the adored Dyson Airwrap family
• Who is it for? I’d recommend it for those with a fair amount of disposable income and a stress-free way to style their hair
• What does it do well? It styles a mean hair
• What are its weaknesses? Take a look at the price

Dyson Airwrap i.d. review: Specs

Dyson Airwrap i.d. review: Price & availability

The Dyson Airwrap i.d. is $599 from Amazon U.S. and £479 from Dyson U.K., although Dyson makes a couple different versions of the Airwrap i.d. I tested the straight + wavy, but there’s also a curly + coily.

The straight + wavy comes in either patina/topaz (my colorway) or vinca blue/topaz. The curly + coily comes in those two colors and also the gorgeous jasper plum color.

All colorways and hair type tools are the same price. Dyson also stocks a range of alternative styling tools, like a diffuser and different styling brushes.

Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be any Dyson-brand extra long curling barrels, which means those with super long hair might not get on with the Airwrap i.d. as much as I did.

If you’re in the U.K. and you have super long hair, you previously would’ve been able to get the Dyson Airwrap Complete Long, but it seems to have been discontinued. However, if you’re in the U.S., the Complete Long is available for $599 on Amazon U.S..

This $600 price makes the Dyson Airwrap i.d. one of the most expensive hair styling tools on the market today. Its closest competitor, the Shark FlexFusion, is just $399 — and it has a flat iron, which the Airwrap i.d. lacks.

The older version, Shark FlexStyle, is often on sale for around $249, so could be a good option for those on a tighter budget.

Dyson Airwrap i.d. review: Design

I’d say that one of the most iconic aspects of the Dyson Airwrap collection — Dyson as a brand, one could argue — is its design. No other products on the market look like Dyson’s.

However, I’m a little disappointed by one or two aspects of the Airwrap i.d.’s design, especially when you consider how expensive this product is, which I’ll get into below.

Styling tools

Gone are the ‘L’ and ‘R’ curling wand barrels of yore. Now Dyson has one curling barrel for each size. The direction of airflow is changed by twisting the top from side to side. This is much, much easier than swapping out and switching barrels, which Dyson fixed with the 2023 model, but it was still a major issue before the fix.

The Airwrap i.d. comes with a conical barrel, ideal for tighter curls, and the original 40mm barrel for loose waves. I found the 40mm barrel was a little too big for my relatively short hair (halfway through testing, I got about 3 inches cut off, which you’ll be able to see in the pictures below), so I’d recommend the conical for short hair or tight curls.

On top of curling barrels, the Airwrap i.d. comes with a firm styling brush for drying hair straight, a round brush for that ‘90s blowout, and a dryer. I’ll discuss each of these attachments individually in the ‘Performance’ section, with photos.

Finally, there’s a flyaway tamer tool. I tried it for testing purposes, but my hair never reached levels of frizz and static to require the extra flyway tamer, so it’s difficult for me to evaluate its efficacy. However, I did mess up my hair to the best of my ability and tame those flyaways for the purpose of this review, and it’s pretty great.

All of the attachments are backwards-compatible and made of high-quality plastic, with none of the burning plastic smell you can get with cheaper hair stylers. My bedroom often smelled like a hair salon after styling my hair, which made me feel way more professional than I am.

Handling

The base is just 1.3 pounds, which I never found weighed my arm down during styling. The Original Airwrap was 1.45 pounds, so Dyson’s going the right way with the new iterations.

What did weigh me down (metaphorically) was the hassle of moving my mirror every time I needed to use the Airwrap i.d.. The cord is 8.7 feet, which sounds like a lot, but it isn't if, like me, there’s only one set of plug sockets in your bedroom.

As a result, I couldn’t get the styler over to my mirror setup so I had to move my mirror beside the plug socket every time I needed to do my hair. Why can't I just move my mirror permanently beside the outlets? There are doors and radiators in the way.

While this is a me problem, I doubt it’s only a me problem and that every single house has optimally-arranged power outlets. I’d like to see a longer cord on the next iteration of the Airwrap.

Storage

Here’s where my main annoyance with the Airwrap’s design comes in. Now, I don’t think of myself as much of a nit-picker or stickler for the minutiae. However, when a product costs $600, the part of me that makes excuses for imperfections dissolves like the Wicked Witch taking a shower.

I got the ceramic patina/topaz colorway, but the travel case is the vinca blue shade, not ceramic patina. If I’m spending over $500 for a glorified hair dryer, I would expect the storage case to match the colorway of said glorified hair dryer. It seems as if Dyson made one travel case to match one colorway, and said ‘tough luck’ to everyone ordering the ceramic patina shade.

Despite my complaints regarding the color, the storage case itself is remarkably well-made, with a soft close lid and upholstered interior. I do love the box, I just wish it matched the color of my Airwrap.

Dyson Airwrap i.d. review: App & smart functions

The i.d.’s main talking point is that it’s a smart hair styler. In reality, this translates to app compatibility with the ‘My Dyson’ app, available on iOS and Google Play. The app is pretty useful, helping you make the most out of the Airwrap i.d. with a range of tutorials and guides.

The i.d. also has a hands-free AI curling mode, called ‘i.d. Curl’. It’s basically an automated curling routine: it wraps your hair for a set amount of time, then curls the hair, and cool shots the hair automatically. You don’t need to change heat or fan speed throughout this process.

I customized the seconds based on how wet my hair was each time I used this, which was easy as pie in the app. Although it’s nice that this is an option, I didn’t find myself gravitating towards it — but that’s just me. I can imagine this would be useful for people who use the curling wand attachments every day, but I just didn’t.

Dyson Airwrap i.d. review: Performance

I’ll discuss every styling attachment in this section with pictures of my results. For context, I used to have a perm, which you can still see in the texture on the lower half of my hair. I used the Airwrap i.d. on my short-ish medium-thickness hair, and my sister also used it on her thick, wavy, waist-length bleached hair.

I’ll mention here that the Airwrap i.d. is unnaturally quiet — just 74dB on max fan. The Heist hair dryer I tested recently was 91dB on max, and that was considered quiet.

Dryer

To dry my hair from sopping wet to 80% dry took less than 5 minutes, which is remarkably faster than the cheap BaByliss hair dryer I was using before. My sister dried her hair fully in just 5 minutes, which normally takes upwards of 10 with a non-jet dryer.

Not only was the dryer attachment super fast, it also controlled flyaways and frizz very easily thanks to the ionic charge (when a hairdryer releases positive and negative ions simultaneously).

Round brush

I used the round brush and the firm smoothing brush 90% of the time in my daily routine. As someone who’s trying to grow out a perm and embrace her naturally straight hair, I needed the smoothing brush and round brush to tame those curls.

This picture is from the very first time I used the Airwrap i.d. on my hair.

As you can see, right off the bat I got great results. I’d seen discourse online that the Airwrap in general has a steep learning curve, but I can honestly say that I didn’t experience that.

I used the round brush to take my hair from 80% dry (after using the hair dryer tool and the firm smoothing brush tool to get it from 0% to 80%), which straightened out all of the kinks from my leftover perm.

To style my bangs, with the styler switched off, I laid my hair over the round brush. Then I put it on medium fan/high heat and rolled it over and over until the hair was dry. To fix the longer sides, I curled it away from my face and rolled the brush to give that swoopy appearance.

I found that this brush was only frustrating when it flicked out the bottom of my hair (due to me not rolling it in the right direction), but when this happened, all I had to do was rotate the brush the opposite way and it sorted itself out.

I used the round brush every time I washed my hair, not every day, because thankfully, the style stayed in my hair for days.

Firm smoothing brush

This is the brush I used to dry my hair mostly straight. Even so, it works like a normal firm hairbrush, but it dries your hair at the same time as brushing it straight. I was able to get a mostly straight result with just this brush, but it struggled to tame frizz independently of the round brush.

Curling barrels

I would say the Airwrap line is most famous for its vortex-creating, auto-wrapping curling barrels, and the i.d. is no different.

As I have quite short hair, when I visited my family home during testing, I let my sister use the i.d. on her long, thick, naturally wavy hair.

It’s not a perfect result by any means, but it’s pretty good considering she’d never even held a Dyson Airwrap before this. I left her to her own devices to see how steep the learning curve was. As you can see, the curls are pretty loose, and she missed some sections, but it’s a great first try.

She reported that it only took 10 minutes to blow dry, then 15 minutes to curl her hair, compared to the hour she normally spends on drying and curling, or the dreaded heatless sock curls that make you have the worst night’s sleep of your life.

She did, however, mention that her hair was almost too long to wrap around the barrel properly, so those with longer hair might struggle to get a full curl. Unfortunately, Dyson doesn’t seem to stock its proprietary long barrels on its website any more, but they could come back in stock.

I used the conical barrel to curl my hair: ironic when half of my hair is permed curly anyway.

Although I don’t necessarily like how this style looked on me, I can acknowledge that the Airwrap performed well and this style was a success.

Using the styler was super easy as well thanks to the companion App’s ‘i.d. Curl’ system I described earlier. I customized the times longer than the default as my hair was pretty wet. It took me exactly 32 minutes (judging from the time stamps on the selfies) from soaking wet to a curled style, which might seem like a long time, but it’s really not in styling terms.

Figuring out which way to curl my hair was the most challenging part of the whole process, as I’m really not the most coordinated person in the world (although I could be a contender for clumsiest person in the world). The difficulties I experienced were truly a me problem, not an everyone problem.

Flyaway tamer

Completely honestly? I never needed to use the flyaway tamer. The round brush was so good as taming my frizz that I never reached for the tamer. I did use it for testing purposes, and I can see it being useful, but it wasn’t necessary for me.

The flyaway tamer is basically a plastic roller (imagine a paint roller, if you will) with an orange rod on one end. You use it by placing it on top of your hair, and turning the Airwrap on when the roller is flat on your hair. Then you slowly pull the roller down your hair to smooth your flyaways down.

In this photo, one side of my hair had been ‘tamed’ and the other side I’d left untamed. I like the messier, lived-in look more, hence why I rarely gravitated towards the flyaway tamer. Can you tell which side I used the flyaway attachment on? (Hint: it’s not the right.) As you can see, the flyaway tamer works really well, if that’s the kind of thing you like.

Dyson Airwrap i.d. review: Storage & maintenance

As I touched on above, the Airwrap i.d. comes with a storage case. It being the wrong color aside, it’s a really handy case that means I can leave my Airwrap out and it doesn’t look messy.

The Airwrap i.d. comes with a filter cleaning tool, which Dyson recommends you use monthly to ensure the motor is spinning at its optimal speed. Cleaning the filter is really easy: (while off and cool, obviously) you remove the collar and rinse it, then clean the mesh casing with the cleaning brush, and leave everything to dry, ensuring no water gets into the mechanism.

Dyson offers a 2-year ‘replacement or repairs’ warranty in the U.K. and the U.S.. However, Shark offers a 5-year warranty in the U.K. and the U.S., which is something to consider for longevity.

Dyson Airwrap i.d. review: Verdict

Honestly? I have nothing bad to say about the Dyson Airwrap i.d. The patina and topaz colorway is simply mind-bogglingly gorgeous, and the range of attachments almost makes it worth the gag-worthy $600 price tag.

I don’t really see why people claim the Airwrap has a steep learning curve, because I wouldn’t call myself a hair styling fiend (just someone with pin straight hair forced to style to be able to go outside) and I found it really easy.

Obviously it takes some playing around with to get the ideal result for your personal taste and hair type, but for me? It took me maybe three tries to get my routine down pat. And if I ever want to wear my hair curly again, I can get gorgeous ringlets with hardly any heat damage on the same styler I use to straighten my hair.

Yes, it’s expensive, but when you consider that ionic hairdryers can go for $100, ghd straighteners can go for $200+, and ghd curling wands are upwards of $200, you’re really only spending an extra $100 for the Dyson branding and the convenience of having everything bundled into just one styler.

Now, I don’t know if I can ever be without a Dyson Airwrap. I’m an Airwrap girlie now.