My hair is curly, coarse, and thick. Some days that feels like a blessing; other days it’s a curse.
Taming it by flat ironing isn’t fun. It’s tiring and can hurt. Cheap designs—which don’t always have a cheap price—pull strands of my hair as I pass the iron through. I can’t count how many times I’ve burned my fingers and neck on my scorched hair from too many passes of 450 degree heat. (Yes. I’ve been burned by my own hair, not the iron.) Then there’s the physical damage it can leave behind…
That’s where Dyson comes in. After seven years of development and around 600 hours of trials, the cordless Corrale hair straightener, released today for the heart stopping price of $500, is a modern take on a hair tool that’s gotten relatively little design attention in the last few decades.
At first glance you may be underwhelmed. After all, Dyson is known for its distinctive design that you can spot from a mile away, with its modern stick vacuums (our favorite Dyson vacs) and bladeless fans.
But Dyson is slowly building a hair-centric catalog. It entered the beauty world in 2016 putting that bladeless design into a hair dryer that looked revolutionary—for the bougie price of $400. The Corrale, on the other hand, looks like a regular flat iron, aside from a pop of Dyson’s signature hot pink. But take a closer look and you’ll see its secret: flexing plates.
A New Kind of Iron
If you’ve used a flat iron before, you know what it’s like when you’re passing through a section of hair and half the hair starts splaying outward, losing its contact with the hot plates, forcing you to start over and redo that area. The Corrale’s flexing copper plates are supposed to wrap themselves around the hair, which keeps it gathered together. I saw a side-by-side comparison of the Corrale versus a typical flat-plated iron, and was impressed by how efficiently it went through hair, and how much more hair it could straighten at once.
Almost every flat iron company claims its product causes less harm to your hair than the others—usually by spewing confusing jargon about negative ions that somehow create shine and prevent damage. The results never match the hype. Dyson’s science seems easier to digest. The flexing plates and temperature settings should result in fewer passes—and fewer passes means less damage.
