Tag: dyson
Dyson Zone Review: Air-Purifying Headphones Are Overpriced and Embarrassing
Dyson launches revolutionary new hair tool – what is the Airstrait and when does it go on sale?
DYSON is back with a new hair tool that is set to change the game – again.
The new Airstrait is a wet-to-dry straightener that is here to revolutionise your mornings, here’s everything you need to know.
Dyson have launched the Airstrait, a wet-to-dry straightener[/caption]
- Dyson Airstrait, $499.99 – click here
The new Dyson Airstrait is a wet-to-dry straightener tool that styles, straightens, and dries your hair in one go with no hot plates or heat damage.
Priced at $499.99, it’s not cheap, but is set to be one of Dyson’s most popular products yet.
Available now from dyson.com, the Airstrait is available in the USA, Canada, and Mexico from May 11, with a UK launch date and UK price to be announced soon.
Following years of research and development, the new Airstrait straightener uses powerful focused airflow to dry and straighten your hair simultaneously from wet.
With fast, smooth, and shiny results it’s a beauty must-have, and a game-changer for those looking for speedy, swish, sleek hair.
The new tool looks incredible[/caption]
It’s been engineered for multiple hair types, and the stylers can achieve a naturally straight style, with body and movement, without pulling and damaging hair.
The Airstrait uses a hair tress which is contained by two arms, from which a “precisely angled high-pressure blade of air is forced downwards and into the hair, both simultaneously drying and straight styling, with one machine”.
James Dyson, Founder and Chief Engineer said “Having a strong understanding of how to manipulate and realise the potential of powerful airflow is fundamental to the performance of the Dyson Airstrait straightener.
“This expertise, which we’ve gained over the last 25 years, is what has enabled us to deliver our first wet-to-dry straightener, with no hot plates, and no heat damage. Delivering the ease-of-use that people love about straighteners but with high-velocity air blades, saves time, maintains hair strength and achieves an everyday natural straight style.”
There’s also a root dry function[/caption]
The Airstrait’s secret weapon is their precision air jets.
Placed along the arms of the machine are two 1.5mm apertures, they create two high-velocity downward blades of air, which are projected at a 45° angle.
This causes them to converge and created one focused jet of air, and create a downward force to straighten hair as it dries – this directional airflow helps to align the hair strands, leaving you with a smooth and shiny finish.
But how does it do all this without damaging your hair?
Dyson has researched the science of style for over a decade, looking at everything from “the structure of hair, to airflow dynamics whilst understanding thermal, mechanical and chemical damage” – and the subsequent effects on hair health.
It can be used on wet and dry hair[/caption]
To change and style your hair, hydrogen bonds within hair strands must be broken and reset to hold a new shape – which is done with heat or moisture.
However high heat can damage your hair, and so styling with powerful airflow from wet, results in less need for high heat, creating less frizz and flyaways (and adds shine).
As when your hair is wet, these bonds are weaker, so you can reset them as your hair dries – which reduces the need for extreme temperatures.
By using an optimum level of heat, and controlled airflow, there’s less damage to the hair, but also helps maintain volume and movement.
The Airstrait has two styling modes, ‘Wet’ and ‘Dry’ styling modes, and a ‘Cool’ mode to set the style.
In Wet mode, beauty fans can choose between, three heat settings of 80°C, 110°C and 140°C, and in ‘Dry’ mode, choose between 120°C, or 140°C, or a top-up “boost” – as well as two airflow controls, low and high.
And to ensure your hair stays in its best condition, it also uses intelligent heat sensors, to measure the temperature of airflow 30 times per second to prevent heat damage and protect hair’s natural shine.
There’s also a cold shot, root drying mode, and sensors which will automatically turn it off when not in use.
A release date is set to be announced in due course, and we can’t wait to get our hands on one – we’ll be updating this page with more information when we know more.
What date will the Dyson Airstrait arrive in store?
The Dyson Airstrait will arrive in store on May 11, but only in the US, Canada and Mexico.
A UK release date is expected very soon but hasn’t been revealed just yet.
Where will I be able to buy the Dyson Airstrait?
The Dyson Airstrait will be available from Dyson.co.uk following its launch in the UK.
It’s likely to be available exclusively from Dyson’s website before becoming available from other concessions, including John Lewis, Currys, Boots and Amazon.
How much is the Dyson Airstrait?
Currently, only US prices have been released. Priced at $499.99, UK prices will be announced alongside a UK release date.
This won’t be long, but we’ll update this page when we know more.
Can I use the Dyson Airstrait on dry hair?
Yes, the Dyson Airstrait can be used on dry hair.
The Dyson Airstrait can be used in ‘Dry’ mode, with heat temperatures of 120°C, or 140°C to straighten hair.
It’ll still straighten your hair, and leave you with a sleek result, however, for best results it’s recommended with damp hair.
Can I curl my hair with the Dyson Airstrait?
We haven’t tried this yet! As the Dyson Airstrait is designed for straightening hair, it’s not the tool of choice.
We’d recommend that Airwrap is used for curls.
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Every Dyson hair tool and almost every cordless vacuum is on sale
UPDATE: May. 10, 2023, 5:00 p.m. EDT This post has been updated to reflect the current availability and sale pricing of Dyson vacuums, air-purifying fans, and hair tools. Shop our top picks below:
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(save $120 at Best Buy)
The automated convenience of a robot vacuum is undeniably sweet, but for some, a Roomba just can’t compare to the rush or attention to detail of manual vacuuming. That’s where Dyson comes in. Shop this week’s deals on Dyson vacuums below. For help comparing models, check out our guide to Dyson’s current stick, ball, canister, and handheld vacs.
Our top pick
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Why we like it
Dyson’s largest and most in charge-est cordless vacuum rarely sees a discount, but Best Buy will sneak you $100 off compared to the regular MSRP at Dyson’s website. The Outsize Absolute+ features Dyson’s iconic laser to scope out microscopic dust on hard floors and digs into carpet with some of Dyson’s strongest cyclonic suction. The half-gallon dust bin and 120-minute battery life double that of Dyson’s other powerhouse, the V15.
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Dyson V10 Allergy — $329.99
$529.99(save $200) -
Dyson V10 Absolute — $399.99
$599.99(save $200) -
Dyson V10 Animal — $449.99
$549.99(save $100) -
Dyson V11 Torque Drive — $522.99
$699.99(save $177) -
Dyson V12 Detect Slim — $549.99
$649.99(save $100) -
Dyson V15 Detect — $649.99
$749.99(save $100) -
Dyson Outsize — $799.99
$899.99(save $100)
Canister and upright Dyson and deals
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Dyson Ball Multi Floor Origin — $182
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Dyson Big Ball — $328.99
$499.99(save $171) -
Dyson Ball Animal 2 — $399.99
$499.99(save $100) -
Dyson Ball Animal 3 — $399.99
$549.99(save $150)
Dyson fan deals
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Dyson PureCool TP01 — $299.99
$399.99(save $100) -
Dyson Pure Hot + Cool HP01 — $399.99
$499.99(save $100) -
Dyson PureCool TP02 — $419.99
$519.99(save $100) -
Dyson Purifier Humidify+Cool Autoreact PH3A — $599.99
$799.99(save $200)
Dyson hair tool deals
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Dyson Supersonic — $343.99
$429.99(save $86) -
Dyson Corrale — $399.99
$499.99(save $100) -
Dyson Airwrap Complete — $479.99
$599.99(save $120)
Could We Build a Dyson Sphere Around the Sun Using Jupiter for Raw Materials?
We’d need an astronomical amount of resources to construct a Dyson sphere, a giant theoretical shell that would harvest all of a given star’s energy, around the Sun. In fact, as science journalist Jaime Green explores in her new book “The Possibility of Life,” we’d have to go as far as to demolish a Jupiter-sized planet to build such a megastructure, a concept first devised by physicist Freeman Dyson in 1960…
Not everybody agrees that constructing a Dyson sphere would end up being such a huge undertaking. In an interview with Green, astrophysicist Jason Wright compared such an effort to [the city of] Manhattan, a human and interconnected “megastructure,” which was constructed over a long period of time, bit by bit… “It’s just every generation made it a little bigger….”
“If the energy is out there to take and it’s just gonna fly away to space anyway, then why wouldn’t someone take it?” Wright told Green.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Hitting the Books: We’d likely have to liquidate Jupiter to build a Dyson Sphere around the Sun
The gargantuan artificial construct enveloping your local star is going to be rather difficult to miss, even from a few light years away. And given the literally astronomical costs of resources needed to construct such a device — the still-theoretical-for-humans Dyson Sphere — having one in your solar system will also serve as a stark warning of your technological capacity to ETs that comes sniffing around.
Or at least that’s how 20th century astronomers like Nikolai Kardashev and Carl Sagan envisioned our potential Sol-spanning distant future going. Turns out, a whole lot of how we predict intelligences from outside our planet will behave is heavily influenced by humanity’s own cultural and historical biases. In The Possibility of Life, science journalist Jaime Green examines humanity’s intriguing history of looking to the stars and finding ourselves reflected in them.
Excerpted from The Possibility of Life by Jaime Green, Copyright © 2023 by Jaime Green. Published by Hanover Square Press.
On a Scale of One to Three
The way we imagine human progress — technology, advancement — seems inextricable from human culture. Superiority is marked by fast ships, colonial spread, or the acquisition of knowledge that fuels mastery of the physical world. Even in Star Trek, the post-poverty, post-conflict Earth is rarely the setting. Instead we spend our time on a ship speeding faster than light, sometimes solving philosophical quandaries, but often enough defeating foes. The future is bigger, faster, stronger — and in space.
Astronomer Nikolai Kardashev led the USSR’s first SETI initiatives in the early 1960s, and he believed that the galaxy might be home to civilizations billions of years more advanced than ours. Imagining these civilizations was part of the project of searching for them. So in 1964, Kardashev came up with a system for classifying a civilization’s level of technological advancement.
The Kardashev scale, as it’s called, is pretty simple: a Type I civilization makes use of all the energy available on or from its planet. A Type II civilization uses all the energy from its star. A Type III civilization harnesses the energy of its entire galaxy.
What’s less simple is how a civilization gets to any of those milestones. These leaps, in case it’s not clear, are massive. On Earth we’re currently grappling with how dangerous it is to try to use all the energy sources on our planet, especially those that burn. (So we’re not even a Type I civilization, more like a Type Three-quarters.) A careful journey toward Type I would involve taking advantage of all the sunlight falling on a planet from its star, but that’s just one billionth or so of a star’s total energy output. A Type II civilization would be harnessing all of it.
It’s not just that a Type II civilization would have to be massive enough to make use of all that energy, they’d also have to figure out how to capture it. The most common imagining for this is called a Dyson sphere, a massive shell or swarm of satellites surrounding the star to capture and convert all its energy. If you wanted enough material to build such a thing, you’d essentially have to disassemble a planet, and not just a small one — more like Jupiter. And then a Type III civilization would be doing that, too, but for all the stars in its galaxy (and maybe doing some fancy stuff to suck energy off the black hole at the galaxy’s core).
On the one hand, these imaginings are about as close to culturally agnostic as we can get: they require no alien personalities, no sociology, just the consumption of progressively more power, to be put to use however the aliens might like. But the Kardashev scale still rests on assumptions that are baked into so many of our visions of advanced aliens (and Earth’s own future as well). This view conflates advancement not only with technology but with growth, with always needing more power and more space, just the churning and churning of engines. Astrophysicist Adam Frank identifies the Kardashev scale as a product of the midcentury “techno-utopian vision of the future.” At the point when Kardashev was writing, humanity hadn’t yet been forced to face the sensitive feedback systems our energy consumption triggers. “Planets, stars, and galaxies,” Frank writes, “would all simply be brought to heel.”
Even in the Western scientific tradition, alternatives to Kardashev’s scale have been offered. Aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin proposed one scale that measures planetary mastery and another that measured colonizing spread. Carl Sagan offered one that accounts for the information available to a civilization. Cosmologist John D. Barrow proposed microscopic manipulation, going from Type I–minus, where people can manipulate objects of their own scale, down through the parts of living things, molecules, atoms, atomic nuclei, subatomic particles, to the very fabric of space and time. Frank proposed looking not at energy consumption but transformation, noting that a sophisticated civilization does more than bring a planet to heel, it must learn to find balance between resource use and long-term survival.
Of these — again, all white American or European men — only Sagan offers a measure of advancement that isn’t necessarily acquisitive. Even the manipulation of atoms, which may seem so small and delicate, requires massive amounts of energy in the form of particle accelerators, not to mention that this kind of tinkering has also unleashed humanity’s greatest destructive force. But Sagan’s super-advanced civilization could be nothing more than a massive, massive library, filled with scholars and philosophers, expanding and exploring mentally but with no dominion over their planet or star. (Yet, one has to ask: What is powering those libraries? The internet is ephemeral, but it is not free.)
Implicit in any vision of vast progress is not just longevity but continuity. The assumption of the ever upward-sloping line is bold to say the least. In the novella A Man of the People, Ursula K. Le Guin writes of one world, Hain, where civilization has existed for three million years. But just as the last few thousand years on Earth have seen empires rise and fall, and cultures collapse and displace one another, so it is on Hain at larger scale. Le Guin writes, “There had been…billions of lives lived in millions of countries…infinite wars and times of peace, incessant discoveries and forgettings…an endless repetition of unceasing novelty.” To hope for more than that is perhaps more optimistic than to imagine we might domesticate a star. Perhaps it’s also shortsighted, extrapolating out eons of future from just the last few centuries of life on two continents, rather than a wider view of many millennia on our whole world.
All of these scales of progress are built on human assumptions, specifically the colonizing, dominating, fossil-fuel-burning history of Europe and the United States. But scientists don’t see much use in thinking about the super-advanced alien philosophers and artists and dolphins, brilliant as they might be, because it would be basically impossible for us to find them.
The scientific quest for advanced aliens is about trying to imagine not just who might be out there but how we might find them. Which is how we end up at Dyson spheres.
Dyson spheres are named for Freeman Dyson, the physicist, mathematician, and general polymath. While most SETI scientists in the early 1960s were looking for extraterrestrial beacons, Dyson thought “one ought to be looking at the uncooperative society.” Not obstinate, just not actively trying to help us. “The idea of searching for radio signals was a fine idea,” he said in a 1981 interview, “but it only works if you have some cooperation at the other end. So I was always thinking about what to do if you were looking just for evidence of intelligent activities without anything in the nature of a message.” And you might as well start with the easiest technology to detect — the biggest or brightest. So the massive spheres Dyson popularized in his 1960 paper were the result of him asking What is the largest feasible technology?
In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Relics,” the Enterprise finds itself caught in a massive gravitational field, even though there are no stars nearby. The source, on the view screen, is a matte, dark gray sphere. Riker says its diameter is almost as wide as the Earth’s orbit.
Picard asks, with hushed wonder, “Mr. Data, could this be a Dyson sphere?”
Data replies, “The object does fit the parameters of Dyson’s theory.”
Commander Riker isn’t familiar with the concept, but Picard doesn’t give him any trouble for that. “It’s a very old theory, Number One. I’m not surprised that you haven’t heard of it.” He tells him that a twentieth century physicist, Freeman Dyson, had proposed that a massive, hollow sphere built around a star could capture all the star’s radiating energy for use. “A population living on the interior surface would have virtually inexhaustible sources of power.”
Riker asks, with some skepticism, if Picard thinks there are people living in the sphere.
“Possibly a great number of people, Commander,” Data says. “The interior surface area of a sphere this size is the equivalent of more than two hundred and fifty million Class M [Earthlike] planets.”
In Dyson’s thinking, the goal wasn’t living space but energy — how would a civilization reach Type II? And Dyson’s writing was clearly speculative. In the paper, he wrote, “I do not argue that this is what will happen in our system; I only say that this is what may have happened in other systems.” Decades later, astrophysicist Jason Wright took up the search.
One of the great benefits to this approach, Wright told me, is that “nature doesn’t make Dyson spheres.” Wright is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, where he is director of the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center. But while the best known version of SETI is listening for radio signals (more on that in the next chapter), Wright focuses on looking for technosignatures — evidence of technology out among the stars. Technosignatures allow you to find those uncooperative aliens Dyson thought would make the best targets. We don’t even need to find the aliens, in this case, just proof they once existed. That could be a stargate, or a distant planet covered in elemental silicon (geologically unlikely, but technologically great for solar panels), or it could be a Dyson sphere.
Wright’s first big search for Dyson spheres was called Glimpsing Heat from Alien Technologies, or G-HAT. Or, even better, Gˆ (because that’s a G with a little hat on it). The premise was simple: Dyson spheres don’t just absorb energy, they transform it, inevitably radiating some waste as heat which we can see as infrared radiation. So, from 2012 to 2015, Wright and his team looked at about a million galaxies, searching for a Type II civilization on its way to Type III, having ensconced enough of a galaxy’s stars in Dyson spheres that the galaxy might glow unusually bright in infrared. (They surveyed galaxies rather than individual stars because, as Wright writes, “A technological species that could build a Dyson sphere could also presumably spread to nearby star systems,” so it’s fair to think a galaxy with one Dyson sphere may have several, and several would be easier to find than just one. Might as well start there.) None were found, but you know that because you would’ve surely heard about it if Wright’s search had succeeded.
Wright prides himself on the agnosticism of this approach. He doesn’t need aliens to be looking for us or to have any certain sociological impulses. They just need technology. “Technology uses energy,” he told me. “That’s kind of what makes it technology. Just like life uses energy.” That view makes demolishing a Jupiter-sized planet to build a star-encompassing megastructure seem almost comically simple, but Wright doesn’t even see the existence of a Dyson sphere as requiring massive coordination or forethought on the aliens’ part. It is truly, in his view, a low-intensity ask. He compared it to Manhattan, a fair example of a human “megastructure,” a massive, interconnected, artificial system. “It was planned to some degree, but no one was ever like, ‘Hey, let’s build a huge city here.’ It’s just every generation made it a little bigger.” He thinks a Dyson sphere or swarm could accumulate in a similar manner. “If the energy is out there to take and it’s just gonna fly away to space anyway, then why wouldn’t someone take it?”
Wright knows the objections: that this imagines a capitalist orientation, a drive to “dominate nature” that is by no means universal, not even among human societies. But for his research to work, this drive doesn’t need to be universal among the stars. It just has to have happened sometimes, enough for us to see the results. As he put it, “There’s nothing that drives all life on Earth to be large. In fact, most life is small. But some life is large.” And if an alien were to come to Earth, they wouldn’t need to see all the small life to know the planet was inhabited. A single elephant would do the trick.
Some hypothetical alien technosignatures might be less definitive. In 2017, astronomers detected a roughly quarter-mile-long rocky object slingshotting through the solar system. They realized that this object, called ‘Oumuamua, came from outside the system — because of its speed and the path it took. It was the first interstellar object ever detected in our system. While hopes or fears that it was an alien probe were not realized, it was a reminder that alien technology could be found closer to home, lurking around our own sun.
“We don’t know that there’s not technology here because we’ve never really checked,” Wright said. “I mean, I guess if they had cities on Mars, we would notice—if they were on the surface, anyway.” But, he pointed out, much of the Earth’s surface doesn’t have active, visible technology. The same could go for the solar system beyond Earth, too. There could be alien probes or debris, like ‘Oumuamua but constructed, moving so fast or so dark that we don’t see them. Maybe there’s an alien base on the dwarf planet Ceres, or buried under the surface of Mars. The lunar monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Wright reminded me, was buried just under the surface of the moon. All those ancient interstellar gates sci-fi is fond of have to be found before they can be used. Don’t forget, until 2015, our best image of Pluto was a blurry blob. So much of what we know about even our own solar system is inference and assumption.
Skeptics love to ask Okay, so where is everyone? But we don’t know for sure that they aren’t — or haven’t been — here.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/hitting-the-books-the-possibility-of-life-jaime-greene-hanover-square-press-113047089.html?src=rss
The Best Dyson Vacuums (2023): V15, V12, and More
Dyson Ball Animal 3 Extra Review: High Suction, High Capacity
Get great blowouts at home with big savings on a refurbished Dyson Supersonic hair dryer
Save $160: As of April 7, you can get a refurbished Dyson Supersonic hair dryer on sale for $269.99 at Walmart.
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Dyson Supersonic hair dryer (Refurbished)
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You know it, you love it: the Dyson Supersonic hair dryer. It’s famous for two things: helping you achieve gorgeous, salon-quality blowouts, and an exorbitant price tag. Spending $430 on a hair dryer might seem outlandish to some, but for anyone looking to save on salon visits over time, it’s a major boon. Unfortunately, its price can be an equally major barrier for most. But what if you could get the much-lauded hair tool for under $300?
As of April 7, you can get a refurbished Dyson Supersonic hair dryer at Walmart for just $269.99, which is a whopping $160 less than its normal price of $429.99. This is the original iron and Fuschia colorway. It may not be brand-new, but it will carry Walmart’s seal of approval — it’ll look new, and you’ll have peace of mind that the retailer has tested, cleaned, and inspected the hair dryer so you know it’ll work out of the box.
This deal is especially lucrative as this refurb is priced at even less than what Dyson sells its own refurbished Supersonic hair dryer for. Dyson typically charges $329.99, and right now it’s out of stock at the retailer’s online storefront. Double score.
You’re not just paying for the Dyson name, though. This hair dryer really does get the job done, and it does it well. It features high-velocity air jets that help dry your hair efficiently rather than overheating it. It keeps heat damage to a minimum so you can protect your locks instead of burning them up. That way, you get great-looking hair that dries quickly every time.
So if you’ve been waiting for a sign to go ahead and lock one of these bad boys in, consider this your green light.
Almost every cordless Dyson vacuum is on sale — save up to $175
UPDATE: Apr. 5, 2023, 2:30 p.m. EDT This post has been updated to reflect the current availability and sale pricing of Dyson vacuums, air-purifying fans, and hair tools. Shop our top picks below:
The automated convenience of a robot vacuum is undeniably sweet, but for some, a Roomba just can’t compare to the rush or attention to detail of manual vacuuming. That’s where Dyson comes in. Shop this week’s deals on Dyson vacuums below. For help comparing models, check out our guide to Dyson’s current stick, ball, canister, and handheld vacs.
Our top pick
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Our pick: Dyson V12 Detect Slim
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Why we like it
Dyson’s best bang for your buck, the V12 Detect Slim, is seeing a very good silent deal at Walmart: Though Walmart’s $509.99 price isn’t accompanied by the usual strikethrough or green sale price, Dyson’s website confirms the V12 Detect Slim does in fact retail for $649.99. The lightweight Mashable Choice winner comes with two cleaning heads, one being the iconic laser head that points out microscopic dust the naked eye won’t catch.
More cordless Dyson deals
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Dyson V7 Advanced — $229.99
$399.99(save $170) -
Dyson V8 Animal (refurbished) — $279.99
$375(save $95.01) -
Dyson V8 Absolute — $349.99
$499.99(save $150) -
Dyson V10 Animal — $399.99
$549.99(save $150) -
Dyson V11 Torque Drive — $525
$699.99(save $174.99) -
Dyson Outsize+ — $849.99
$949.99(save $100)
Upright Dyson deals
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Dyson Ball Multi Floor Origin — $199.99
$299.99(save $100) -
Dyson Ball Animal 2 Total Clean — $398.96
$449(save $50.04)
Dyson fan deals
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Dyson Purifier Cool Autoreact TP7A — $379.99
$549.99(save $170) -
Dyson Pure Hot + Cool HP01 — $399.99
$519.99(save $120) -
Dyson Purifier Humidify+Cool Autoreact PH3A — $599.99
$799.99(save $200)
Dyson hair tool deals
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Dyson Corrale (first generation) — $399.99
$499.99(save $100) -
Dyson Airwrap (first generation, refurbished) — $429.99
$499.99(save $70)