Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsUseful and compact hair dryer for traveling, but has some quirks...
Reviewed in the United States on June 28, 2018
Going to the gym and having a reasonable amount of travel from time-to-time that keeps a fair distance from home, I wanted to invest in a small inexpensive hair dryer that wouldn't take up much space in my bag. This compact folding hair dryer from Conair works reasonably well but could use improvements. As I noted in other reviews on this hair dryer, it appears that there was a design change and there is a potential to get one's hair caught in the air intake flow if one's not careful. Keeping that in mind I do use this unit with caution, but for the most part it functions as intended. Most other hair dryers with the same 1875 WATT performance I was considering at first were a bit too high in price for the potential of it getting banged around in a gym or travel bag on a fairly regular basis.
Outside of the concerning safety hazard of getting one's hair caught in the suction, this hair dryer does dry reasonably well and is both compact plus folds up for easy travel use. I hope this will last for a reasonable amount of time, but I will probably be on the lookout for a different travel unit given I don't want to deal with impromptu hair cut sessions if enough of my hair gets sucked into the air intake flow. I noticed some stray hairs fly off my hairbrush during use earlier as it was pulled into that air intake flow mesh. There's no proper way I can see to clean the unit or prevent that from happening in the future short of being very careful when using. So that does concern me on overall product lifetime usability.
The instructions that come with the hair dryer unit leave much to be desired in explaining the full features. There's a section that can turn the dryer's function from 150 to 250 if you keep it in the low setting when traveling overseas. Most picking up this hair dryer in the US will not need to change it from the default, but one has to really hunt in the disorganized fold-out instruction for the hair dryer to learn even that much. Those that may have been expressing a lack of ability to get a proper drying session when using the hair dryer may have had this setting not on the proper area due to an improper setting adjustment before packaging for retail sale. Or it might be that this mechanism inside the hair dryer was defective upon arrival for those customers, but it's not a common setting I have seen in past hair dryers that I've picked up in the past, so most may not know to look for this on the unit. Overall, it does appear to be a reasonable hair dryer that will work for the price, but it has some quirks.