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Review: RevAir hair dryer – it surprisingly sucks (in a good way)

It’s like a vacuum cleaner for your head.

Revair hair dryer review
Image: Josh Knowles / KnowTechie
The Good
The most features I've seen in a hair dryer
Easy to use
The Bad
Expensive
Large and bulky
9
Overall

Every once in awhile, a product is pitched to us here at KnowTechie that seems really cool but really isn’t any of our areas of expertise. This time around, we were offered an opportunity to try out and review a hair dryer, which initially sounds kinda dumb but hey, you know we generally don’t mess with run-of-the-mill stuff here. Our problem here is that while I probably have the longest hair on the KnowTechie team, I don’t do much to take care of it. However, Vicki, my wife, is always drying her hair, so we’ve found a solution here!

RevAir is a “reverse-air hair dryer“, which kinda sounds like a vacuum for your head. My first thought when I heard the description was a Flowbee that doesn’t have clippers on it. I let my wife take it for a spin so she could report back to me and let me know how it worked. She loves when there’s some crazy new tech for us to play with and jumped at the opportunity to take it for a spin… or blow, or suck?

First Reactions

Revair hair dryer

Image: Josh Knowles / KnowTechie

As a couple that has relatively close morning schedules, my wife usually is blowing her hair while I’m taking a shower. Imagine my surprise when Vicki rushed into the bathroom to announce that the RevAir lights up when it is turned on. While that sounded great, I did have to ask her if it just looked cool or if it worked well too. She told me that so far, it worked well but she was getting the hang of it and trying to find the right settings. She also confirmed that, yeah, it works like a vacuum, kinda.

After her initial bout with using the RevAir, we learned a few important things.

First off, the RevAir sounds weird when you describe it but works like a charm. The nozzle of the RevAir is at the end of a vacuum hose and sucks like a vacuum. While sucking, it also blows some air into the nozzle which seems to help dry your hair. Neat.

Also, the hot air is discharged through the main body of the device and if it is run hot enough, it can boil or melt liquids or bottles around the unit. Care to guess how we figured that one out?

What the RevAir does right

Vicki continued to use the RevAir for the next few weeks. I knew she liked it because she kept telling her friends and coworkers about it. That’s usually a good sign. I asked her what the best bits were about the RevAir and her first major takeaway was that it actually saved her time in the mornings. “RevAir has cut the time I spend blow-drying and straightening my hair every day.  It has completely taken out the straightening part of what used to be my daily routine,” she notes.

See, when the RevAir is set on higher settings, the hot air and the vacuum action of the device will straighten her hair while drying it. This completely eliminated the need to straighten her hair after drying and also dried her hair faster overall. As she put it, “Any saved time when trying to get two boys ready in the morning is a win in my book.”

She also liked that the RevAir comes with all the salon-style accessories that she would need to do her hair up all nice. The RevAir included a neat spray bottle that is like the ones that they use at the salon, or Great Clips if you are a lame person like me. There are also a few hair clips for people that need dry different parts of their hair as they go and don’t feel like holding hair up while drying around already completed areas. There is also a mesh bag that you can store the unit and accessories in and tuck it aside. You’ll need it.

The biggest success story for the RevAir is that after a few weeks of using the unit, she noticed that her hair was softer and fuller-bodied. She didn’t have singed, limp hair after going through the rigorous process of air-drying and then straightening her hair. Instead, the reverse-air hair drying process seemed to pull the water out of her hair and the heat would straighten it while keeping it fluffy and straight. I don’t know too much about hair-care but I can tell you that her hair seemed “livelier” and was definitely softer. It wasn’t just words, the RevAir did its job admirably.

She notes that the “RevAir has cut the time I spend blow-drying and straightening my hair every day. It has completely taken out the straightening part of what used to be my daily routine.”

The RevAir isn’t all sunshine and rainbows though

Revair hair dryer review

Image: Josh Knowles / KnowTechie

The RevAir is a super solid device that really changed how mornings worked in my household but there were, of course, a few drawbacks. The biggest issue with the RevAir is that it’s simply an absolute unit of a device. The RevAir took up enough space that the kids would have to jump over the hose and step around the base to get in and out of their bathroom.

While a traditional hair dryer is a heat gun on the end of a cord, the RevAir is a large base unit, huge hose and a large nozzle the is big enough to have its own separate stand. Since my wife couldn’t put the base on the counter without risking boiling the liquid out of the soap dispenser or melting a toothbrush, it needs to be kept on the floor. That means there’s just a lot of moving shit around and taking it out of the house is basically a no-go.

Another issue with the RevAir is that the device could wake the dead. Easily louder than a traditional hair dryer, the RevAir sounds like a vacuum cleaner. While it didn’t generally present a major issue, there was no way my wife was going to ever be able to get ready without waking up the entire house. Even with the door closed, you can hear it fairly loud.

The last and probably most major hurdle that the RevAir has is that it isn’t cheap. At an asking price of $399, there is a huge discrepancy from the $20 hair dryer that she would normally use and the $30 ceramic hair iron she uses. As Vicki told me, the time she saved in the mornings and the improvement in her hair quality definitely was worth the cost over time. However, the cost for those benefits is a bitter pill to swallow and will turn off a lot of people at the get-go.

Convenience has a cost and in the case of RevAir, both come in spades.

Overall, Vicki thought the RevAir was fairly badass. She would have considered buying it if she was already aware of how well it worked and the conveniences it afforded her but also feels that she can’t comfortably enjoy it with the small bathrooms in our home.

In her own words “if you have the money to buy the RevAir, you probably have big bathroom money too.” It the case of the RevAir, it’s a premium piece of tech with a premium price.

A sample unit was provided for the purpose of this review.

Editors’ Recommendations:

The Good
The most features I've seen in a hair dryer
Easy to use
The Bad
Expensive
Large and bulky
9
Overall

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Longtime games journalist and Florida resident. I'm a Guinness World Record holder, wordsmith extraordinaire, MOBA fan, devoted dad and husband. I'm here to spread the gospel of video games.

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