Sylph Smart Hair Dryer review – The small hair dryer that blows the competition away!

REVIEW – I have yet to find a female friend who is happy with the state of their hair.  It is either too curly or too straight.  The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. My hair has always been very fine and very straight.  I have to wash my hair daily because it will become limp and listless with the slightest amount of perspiration (thank you, south Texas!) I wear my hair very short, and I blow dry it each time.  I wash it at night and rewet it in the morning, which means I blow-dry it both in the evening and early in the morning when I am getting ready for work to ‘fluff it up.’  Several years ago, before Covid, my husband gifted me the Dyson blow dryer for Christmas.  I am pretty sure this was also a gift for himself because he was tired of me waking him up early in the morning by blasting the loud, noisy blow dryer each morning for 10 to 15 minutes at a time.  The Dyson is much quieter and has a quicker drying time.  It is also a rather large blow dryer to haul around with me should I decide to go on a trip.  The hair dryers the hotels provide are very noisy, with little airflow.  So when the Sylph Hair Dryer came up for review, and I saw how small it was and how much it resembled a small Dyson, I jumped at the chance to review it.

⬇︎ Jump to summary (pros/cons)
Price: $129.99
Where to buy: Amazon (Save 20% with code: 20GASYLPH expires 2/28/25)

What is it?

The founder of Sylph Tech is from the early core team of DJI, and it took 8 years to design and develop the Sylph hair dryer.  It won over 60 patents and the German Red Dot Design Award. It was designed to be both portable and powerful and comes with a travel bag.

What’s included?

• stickers
• user manual
• travel bag
• hair dryer

Tech Specs

• 850 Watts
• 110,000 rpm motor speed
• intelligent temperature control
• 200 million negative ions
• 8 in long by 1 3/4 in wide 
• .55 lbs
• four temp modes – ambient to intelligent temp
• adjustable speed – no set speed buttons, uses slider

Design and features

The Sylph hair dryer comes with a nice storage/travel bag.  It feels like it is made of suede-type leather with flaps that fold over each other.  They don’t have magnets or catches and will lay on each other.  One side is embossed with the Sylph logo.  I like this as it holds the dryer and cord all in one nice compact package.  There is enough room on top of the dryer to place a comb or even a small roller brush should you choose to do so.

The hair dryer comes in several color combinations, and I received the silver version, which has the logo in orange on the back.  They also have a pink version available on Amazon.

At the bottom of the dryer, just above where the cord connects, you will find a ventilated cap held onto the dryer body by magnets.  Pull the cap towards the cord to expose the filter area and clean any accumulated lint.  This is designed a lot like the lint collection on my Dyson hair dryer.  The magnets holding this cap on are very strong.  I am not worried about it ever accidentally dropping down.

The cord comes with a handy built-in tie-down strap to hold the cord in place when stored in the travel bag or under your cabinet.

The front of the hair dryer has the main power/control button and the speed control slider above it.  Moving the slider up towards the top of the dryer makes the air flow faster.  A short press of the button will turn the hair dryer on.  A long press will turn the dryer off.  A brief button press will change the dryer’s temperature once it is turned on.  

The color of the LED light ring around the power button will change to indicate the temperature setting.  A blue light indicates ambient wind, yellow is warm wind, red is hot wind, and purple is intelligent wind/intelligent hair care.  The dryer will remember your last setting when you turn it on the next time.

I wanted to note that the Sylph has a built-in safety mechanism that will shut down the hair dryer after 30 minutes of inactivity.

Performance

As I mentioned at the beginning of this review, I have very short hair.  I aim to get as much volume as possible when I dry my hair.  My curly-haired friends often prefer a blow dryer with a diffuser because putting high-speed wind on curly hair frequently makes it a big poofy mess.  This dryer does not come with a diffuser.  So, if you are looking for a dryer that has a diffuser, this is not the dryer for you.  If you are looking for a hair dryer that puts out a lot of air and has a good ionizer built in so you don’t get a lot of static build-up, this is the dryer for you.

I want to mention that in the dryer’s name and the fourth button press, there is supposedly some smart functionality built into the dryer.  I tried testing that, but I ended up switching back to the highest heat setting every time because the smart sensor always seemed to turn too cool for me too soon.  The smart functionality is supposed to sense how much moisture is left in your hair and adjust accordingly.  I am not quite sure how it does that, and the manual does not mention how it works.  I think a lot of this may be personal preference.  It was also very cold during my testing, and cooler air felt very cold to me.

I used this dryer at home for a week and ran decibel and wind speed tests on it.  I do know from my husband, who immediately complained the first morning I used the Sylph, that the Sylph was significantly louder than my Dyson.  It certainly had a higher-pitched sound to my ears compared to the Dyson.  Since it is a smaller dryer, it pushes a lot of air through a much smaller circumference hole than the Dyson.

Here are the low and high decibel readings from my Dyson hair dryer set at its lowest and highest speed settings.

Here are the low and high decibel readings from the Sylph hair dryer set at its lowest and highest speed settings.  You can see that even though the dryer is smaller than my Dyson, it does produce more sound than the Dyson.  I want to mention that every dryer I have ever used in a hotel has always been louder than my Dyson, but they have never put out anywhere near the amount of wind velocity the Sylph does.

Next, I decided to compare wind speed.  To do that, I used a handheld anemometer to test it.  I mounted the anemometer on a tripod.  I then tried to stand and place the blow dryers the same distance from the anemometer.  You will see my hand behind the anemometer because I am trying to find the main focus point of the air coming from the blow dryers.    Since the Sylph is more of a pinpoint dryer, I held the dryer closer than my Dyson to the anemometer to get that sweet spot on the wind cups.  I believe that is what caused the higher wind speeds from Sylph compared to the Dyson.  When the wind from the blow dryers hits the sweet spot on the wind cups, you can hear a whistling sound.  I had no way of anchoring the blow dryers into the same space, so I could not be anywhere near as scientific about this test as I wanted to be.

Here is the video of the Dyson.  Switching between high, medium, and low speeds with a button press facing me as the air blows towards the anemometer is easy.  The highest speed recorded for the Dyson was 27mph.  The medium speed was around 23mph, and the low speed was around 18mph.

Here is the video of the Sylph smart hair dryer.  Again, I apologize for my hand getting in the way, as I had difficulty finding the sweet spot on the smaller air funnel.  Its top speed was around 29mp.   The speed adjustment on the Sylph is a slider; it was facing away from me, making it hard to tell when I was in the middle setting.  The lowest airspeed was around 14mph.

Final thoughts

I have found my new travel hair dryer.  The Sylph packs away into a much smaller footprint than my big Dyson dryer while still providing almost the same type of hair-drying capabilities.   If you are looking for a good travel hair dryer or have limited space in your bathroom, I highly recommend the Sylph Smart Hair Dryer.

What I like about the Sylph Smart Hair Dryer

• Very strong airflow.
• It has a nice travel bag.
• The dryer is stored in the bag, with room for other stuff to be packed inside.
• It has a built-in ionizer, so I did not experience any static in my hair.

What needs to be improved?

• I wish the air hole at the end of the dryer were just a bit larger.  If it were the size of the orange ring around it, I think it would be perfect for my needs.
• It would be nice if some diffuser attachment could be made for folks who desire such a feature.

Price: $129.99
Where to buy: Amazon (Save 20% with code: 20GASYLPH expires 2/28/25)
Source: The sample of this product was provided for free by Sylph. Sylph did not have a final say on the review and did not preview the review before it was published.

Check out these other reviews!

• FLIGE 1500w high speed hair dryer review
• Laifen Swift hair dryer review

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