The Joy of… a Good Hair Gadget

ANDI wrote a gadget column for Tatler last decade, discovering beauties like a toaster that adorned your face on every slice of toast and a wine-coloured bra with a wine-filled insert inserted into each cup to either enhance your bust or medicate yourself with alcohol. I found a bikini made of solar panels that generated enough power to charge your phone and – my favourite – a games console remote that you controlled with your pelvic floor muscles, designed to give new mothers a workout for their pubovisceral muscles while also destroying alien spaceships.

My contract lasted for years, as it turned out that the thrill of a new gadget runs deep. At the end of 2022, the UK was simply named this the third country in the world to have built a technology industry worth over a trillion dollars.

Hair dryers were invented in 1888, but the portable version we know today was invented in 1920 by the Racine Universal Motor Company.

Photos by Getty Images

We humans are evolutionarily programmed to seek out and satisfy our basic survival needs, so when they are satisfied, we automatically trigger a dopamine response—a deliberately addictive feeling of pleasure, satisfaction, and motivation. But in an advanced culture where basic survival needs are more readily available, it’s electronic gadgets that lure us with their dopamine highs. Now we can enhance our basic human need to communicate, feel connected, experience pleasure, and find partners through gadgets—a shortcut to primal joy. A neuroimaging study from a 2011 BBC documentary found that Apple products stimulate the same parts of an Apple fan’s brain as a believer’s does when shown religious images: gadgets are our modern icons.

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It’s no wonder I yearn for those heady days of writing ad copy that suggested the possibility of instantly buying a better, smarter, shinier or more productive life – all for £9.99. And this week my heart was lifted to a momentary state of joy again by an inexpensive purchase, an aid that finally eased the frustration of my three-week home beauty routine: a compact, freestanding, height-adjustable, hands-free hair dryer stand.

The joy of a drying rack

I can believe you’re not convinced yet, but imagine a microphone stand for your hair dryer. It’s like having a temporary third hand holding it, freeing up both hands for styling. It’s your ticket to a day of non-stop hair, for less than the cost of a single salon blow-dry.

I put the hair dryer in the hole of the stand, sit in front of it, hold my damp hair with one hand, brush and comb it with the other, and in a few minutes I look like Debra Winger at the end Officer and Gentleman when Richard Gere takes off my hat and my hair flows as he carries me out of the factory into a golden future where I will be tall and thin and forever 23. The joy is real, even if the fantasy is tragic.