Some links on our site may earn us a commission at no extra cost to you. Learn more.
Published July 12, 2026. Updated September 1, 2026.
Dyson vs Shark vs Revlon hair dryers, scored on five weighted axes: the Dyson Supersonic Nural takes it at 56.5 points out of 100. The Revlon One-Step Volumizer PLUS 2.0 is second at 46.5, and the Shark SpeedStyle Pro HD731 finishes last at 42.4. No score above 60 is the real headline. These three machines cost $36.49, $219.99 and $349.99, and between them they publish airflow in three units that cannot be converted into each other, one temperature ceiling, and — in Revlon’s case — no wattage at all. Every hair dryer heat claim here is either stated in numbers or it is not, and mostly it is not.
Prices are approximate, current as of publication, and change frequently — confirm the latest price with the retailer before buying.
I have owned and worn out several hair dryers over the years. The cord, the switch and the filter went first, never the heating element. So I read the upkeep and warranty lines as closely as the temperature claims.
Dyson vs Shark vs Revlon hair dryers scored on five axes
Five axes. Disclosure carries the most weight, because for this category it is the whole problem.
Specs you can check, 25 percent — wattage, airflow and temperature, in units that let you compare one dryer to another. Heat claim you can check, 20 percent, because “no heat damage” is the central marketing promise here and it is either stated in numbers or it is not. Upkeep, 20 percent — what you have to do, buy and clean. Price today, 20 percent, scored as cheapest divided by this one, times ten. Price is deliberately not the biggest weight. These three sit almost a factor of ten apart, so a straight ratio would decide the whole thing by itself. Warranty you can read, 15 percent — the length is worth less than the terms being published somewhere you can find them.
Scoring table for the three hair dryers
| Axis (weight) | Dyson Supersonic Nural | Shark SpeedStyle Pro HD731 | Revlon One-Step Volumizer PLUS 2.0 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Specs you can check (25) | 9 — 1,600 W, 13.3 l/s airflow, four heat settings with stated temperatures | 5 — no wattage published for this model anywhere I could find; airflow given only as a speed claim | 1 — no wattage, no airflow, no temperature on Revlon’s own page; two Target listings disagree |
| Heat claim you can check (20) | 4 — the measurement rate is 20, 40 or 100 times a second depending which Dyson page you open | 8 — a rate, a ceiling and a named damage threshold, all three stated | 2 — “50% less heat exposure”, comparative, with no temperature attached |
| Upkeep (20) | 6 — monthly filter cleaning, and Dyson’s instructions differ by model | 3 — no Shark filter guidance readable on four separate support routes | 7 — no filter information published, so nothing stated to do |
| Price today (20) | 1.0 — $349.99 at Dyson | 1.7 — $219.99 at Best Buy | 10.0 — $36.49 at Target |
| Warranty you can read (15) | 8 — two years, terms published in full | 3 — a document titled two-year warranty, no readable terms, no retailer states a length | 4 — four years, the longest here, and no terms document published at all |
| Tally | 56.5 | 42.4 | 46.5 |
How is the price score calculated?
The price arithmetic, so you can check it: $36.49 ÷ $349.99 = 0.104, times ten is 1.0 for the Dyson. $36.49 ÷ $219.99 = 0.166, or 1.7 for the Shark. The Revlon is cheapest and scores 10. That $36.49 is Target’s lower of two listings for the same product; the other Target listing for the PLUS 2.0 was $65.00 and Walmart had it at $41.99 the same day.
Why does the Shark column score low?
One honest weakness in that Shark column. Sharkclean.com does not permit automated reading, so I could not get Shark’s own price, its warranty terms or its filter guidance from Shark. I tried four support routes and every one failed. Retailer pages carry none of it either — Kohl’s says outright that no warranty information is provided on the product page. Some of Shark’s low score is Shark publishing less. Some of it is a door I could not open. Both are priced into the axis rather than hidden, and if you can read those pages in a browser, Shark’s number should move.
Disagree with a weight? Re-run it. Push price to 45 percent and drop disclosure to 10. The Revlon then wins by a distance, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to believe about a $36 hot-air brush.
How often does Dyson, Shark or Revlon sample its own heat?
Dyson’s central engineering claim is simple. The dryer samples its own air temperature many times a second. It then cuts the heating element before your hair cooks. The number changes depending on which Dyson surface you read.
| Where the claim appears | The rate stated |
|---|---|
| Dyson’s Supersonic-versus-Nural comparison page, about the original Supersonic | 40 times per second |
| The same comparison page, about the Nural | Over 40 times a second |
| Dyson’s Supersonic Origin product page | Over 40 times a second |
| Dyson’s Supersonic Travel product page | Over 100 times a second |
| Ulta’s listing for the Supersonic r | Over 20 times a second |
| Dyson’s own Nural product page | The phrase is not there. It says only that heat control “monitors airflow”, plus a bare “No heat damage” |
| Dyson’s own Supersonic r product page | The phrase is not there. Heat claim reads “No heat damage” |
Read that last pair again. The two flagship dryers Dyson is selling hardest do not carry the measurement claim on their own product pages at all. You find the number on a comparison article, on a cheaper model, or at a retailer.
What do Shark and Revlon claim about heat?
Shark states its version once and states it the same way everywhere. Verbatim, and identical across three retailers: the dryer “measures and regulates temperature 1,000 times a second, never exceeding 230°F, and never approaching heat damaging temperature of 302°F.” That is a rate, a hard ceiling and a named threshold. Shark does not cite a source for the 302°F figure anywhere I could find, which is worth knowing, but a stated ceiling you can hold a company to beats a rate that moves.
Revlon’s claim is that its ceramic titanium tourmaline coating gives “less damage with 50% less heat exposure.” Less than what is doing a lot of work in that sentence — the comparison is against drying and styling as two separate steps, not against a temperature. Revlon publishes no temperature figure, no ceiling and no sensing claim on any dryer page.
Try converting 13.3 liters a second into 100 miles an hour
You cannot. That is the point.
Dyson publishes airflow as a volume: 13.3 liters per second on the Supersonic and the Nural, 12.4 on the Supersonic r, 11.6 on the Travel. Shark publishes a speed: “0-100 mph in less than a second.” Revlon publishes nothing in any unit on any page.
Volume and velocity are different physical quantities. Converting between them needs the nozzle area, and none of the three publishes that either. So the two brands that do disclose something have disclosed it in terms that cannot be set against each other. That is functionally the same as not disclosing.
A standard for this exists. IEC 61855, “Household and similar electrical appliances — methods for measuring the performance of electric hair care appliances,” is in its second edition, dated 2022, and test houses sell rigs built to it. Not one of Dyson, Shark or Revlon cites it on any US page I read. I went looking specifically on Dyson’s Nural page for a test condition attached to the 13.3 l/s figure. The page carries footnotes; they cover marketing comparisons, not measurement conditions.
Look for an independent measurement, and mostly fail
There is less here than the roundups imply.
Consumer Reports tested fourteen dryers. They included the Dyson Supersonic, Supersonic Nural and Supersonic R, and the Shark SpeedStyle Pro HD542. What it scores are five attributes out of five — ease of use, features, noise, weight and air temperature — not minutes or decibels or degrees. The one number visible without a membership is that the Supersonic R ranks first with an overall score of 83. The Shark HD731 and both Revlon One-Step models are not in that tested field. Neither is Dyson’s Travel.
What did TechGearLab measure?
TechGearLab bought fifteen dryers and does publish real measurements, in columns it labels “Maximum Measured Temperature” and “Maximum Measured Air Speed.” Note the word maximum: those are peaks, not averages. Across its whole field the temperatures run 78°F to 200°F and the air speeds 19.4 mph to 35.1 mph. I could not extract the individual rows for these three brands from the page. So I am not going to attribute a figure to a specific model. The range is the honest thing to report.
What does the only published drying time show?
The only drying time anyone publishes for these machines comes from Tom’s Guide, whose reviewer wrote in June 2024 that the Nural cut their “average drying and diffusing time (based on my current hair dryer) from around 35 minutes to 14.47 minutes.” That is one person’s average against their own unnamed previous dryer, on their own hair. It is the source’s own word, and it is not a lab result. The same review lists Dyson’s setting temperatures — 131°F for scalp protect, 212°F on high — but those are Dyson’s published values restated, not independently measured.
There is no independent decibel measurement on any current model from any of these three brands that I could verify. There is also no independent drying time for any Shark or Revlon at all. We do not run a hair lab. What we can do is read the ones that exist and report what they left out, which in this category is most of it.
Forget the power bill, and here is the arithmetic
It is not a real difference. Here is the arithmetic so you can stop wondering.
Ten minutes a day, every day, at the US average residential electricity price of 18.34 cents per kilowatt-hour for June 2026, per the Energy Information Administration. The Dyson Nural is rated 1,600 W: 1.6 kW × 0.167 h × 365 = 97.3 kWh a year, or $17.85. Revlon’s One-Step at its published 1,100 W: 1.1 × 0.167 × 365 = 66.9 kWh, or $12.27.
A difference of $5.58 a year. The gap between the two purchase prices is $313.50, so at $5.58 a year it takes about 5.6 years of daily drying for electricity to cover even a tenth of it.
Two caveats, both real. Rated watts is maximum draw on the highest setting, not what the machine averages across a session, and no maker publishes an average or a duty cycle — so treat those figures as an upper bound rather than a bill. And the 1,100 W is Revlon’s own number for the Salon One-Step; for the PLUS 2.0 specifically, two Target listings give 1,800 W and 1,110 W for the same product, so there is no single figure to use.
Read the owner reports with the counts attached
This is aggregation of what owners report at named retailers, with the counts attached. It is not our own testing.
Revlon has by far the deepest owner record: about 12,400 ratings on the legacy 1,100 W One-Step at Walmart averaging 4.5. Of those, 77 percent are five-star and 7 percent are one-star. The PLUS has 1,935 ratings at 4.3. The two recurring negatives in that Walmart base are noise and heat intensity — and Revlon publishes no temperature figure to check the second one against.
What do Dyson Nural and Shark owners report?
The Dyson Nural has 400 reviews at Best Buy averaging 4.6. It has 21 one-star ratings and a value sub-score of 4.4 against a quality sub-score of 4.7. Drying speed is the most-mentioned positive, at 80 mentions. At Ulta the same dryer sits at 3.0 from 13 reviews, which is too small a sample to lean on; the critical ones there raise durability and say the scalp-protection feature does less once you fit an attachment.
The Shark HD731 has 22 reviews at Best Buy averaging 5.0. Twenty-two. I am not drawing a conclusion from that, and neither should you. Walmart shows 677 ratings at 4.6 — but the identical 677-at-4.6 appears on Walmart’s HD331 listing too, which means Walmart is pooling reviews across variants and it is not two independent samples. The one four-star review at Best Buy called the dryer surprisingly heavy and loud for the price.
Are Dyson, Shark or Revlon hair dryers recalled?
Nothing here is recalled. I searched the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s records for Dyson, Shark, SharkNinja and Revlon hair dryers. I also searched for the One-Step by name. No recall exists on any of them. The CPSC’s recall search resists automated queries, so read that as a thorough search rather than a database sweep.
One correction that matters, because it is the thing you will find if you go looking yourself. Several pages describe the Revlon One-Step sparking or catching fire. Those pages are plaintiff law firm marketing, soliciting claimants. A separate result comes from the CPSC’s public incident database. It hosts unverified consumer-submitted reports the agency explicitly does not vouch for. Neither is a recall, neither is a regulatory finding, and neither should be read as one.
What is real is that the wider hair-dryer category has a shock problem. The CPSC recalled MyOnlyStyler root booster dryers in 2026 and Tideway dryers in 2024, both for electrocution and shock hazards, and issued warnings on two more hot-air brush brands in 2025. All of those are small importers, not the three brands here. If you are shopping below $30 on a marketplace, that is the risk you are shopping in.
Who should skip the Dyson, Shark or Revlon dryer?
Skip the Dyson Supersonic Nural if you were buying it for the heat-sensing claim specifically. That claim is not on the product page for this dryer. Also skip buying it at Ulta or Best Buy without checking Dyson first — that was a $100 gap on the same day, and the Supersonic r showed the same $100 gap.
Skip the Shark SpeedStyle Pro HD731 if you want to read the warranty before you buy. I could not find a length or a set of terms for it on Shark’s site or on any retailer page. Shark’s heat disclosure is the best of the three and its paperwork is the worst.
Skip the Revlon One-Step Volumizer PLUS 2.0 if noise bothers you, or if you want a machine whose basic electrical rating you can establish. Two listings at the same retailer give it two different wattages, and Revlon’s own site gives none. For the wider category of brush-dryers and multi-stylers, our look at one-step stylers covers that decision directly, and the three real tiers of hair dryer explains what ionic and ceramic actually change.
Dyson vs Shark vs Revlon: which should you buy?
The tally says Dyson. My money says Revlon, and I want to be clear that is a disagreement with my own ledger rather than a footnote to it.
The ledger weights disclosure at 45 percent across two axes, because I think a company that will not tell you what its machine does is telling you something. That is a defensible weighting and it is also a journalist’s weighting, not a shopper’s. At $36.49 against $349.99, the Revlon does not have to be good. It has to be nine and a half times worse before the Dyson is the better spend, and 12,400 owners at 4.5 stars say it is not.
Buy the Dyson if you dry long thick hair daily and the minutes are the point — the Nural, from Dyson, at $349.99, not from a retailer at $449.99. The Nural was out of stock on Dyson’s site when checked on October 10, 2026. Buy the Revlon if you are anyone else. The Shark is the one I would not buy at any of these prices, because it is the only one of the three where I could not read the warranty, could not read the filter guidance, and could not find a wattage for the specific model on sale. More grooming comparisons run the same way over in Beauty & Grooming.
