High vs low: I put Shark’s Dyson Airwrap dupe to the test

How does this more affordable multi-styler stack up?

For someone whose hair is a big part of their identity, I’ve never been particularly great at styling it. I tend to let it air dry wavy and voluminous, or slick it back when I’m nearing wash day. Styling tools haven’t featured in my hair arsenal for almost a decade – I don’t even use a hairdryer, which is weird behaviour from someone who writes and thinks about beauty and the multitude of products on the market a lot.

It hasn’t always been like this though. I was once in a committed, co-dependent relationship with my hair straightener. From the ages of 12 to 18, I routinely clipped my thick, wavy hair into four sections, turned my bootleg GHD to a temperature hot enough to start a small house fire and smoothed my unruly locks into submission. My hair straightener went everywhere with me – school, camping, house parties, friends’ houses and questionable skaters’ bedrooms – because, as anyone with frizz-prone, wavy hair knows, keeping your hair poker straight is a full-time job.

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Once I started embracing my natural hair in my early twenties, I felt a weight lift off of me. No longer would my straightener and I be trapped in this sick little dance where she fried the living fuck out of my hair and I had semi-permanent blisters on my fingers from overuse. I was free!! This brief rundown of my history with styling tools is important because it makes me a total novice when it comes to new-fangled inventions like the Dyson Airwrap.

Every woman I know in the beauty world either owns one of these coveted styling tools or desperately wishes they did, but I’ve always felt ambivalent. That all changed when my hairdresser used the Airwrap on me post cut and colour to give me a Matilda Djerf-esque blowout. The sudden urgency with which I needed to acquire an Airwrap felt almost violent. Who knew my hair could bounce like this?? I felt like Anne Hathaway sashaying down the street in The Devil Wears Prada to the soundtrack of KT Tunstall’s ‘Suddenly I See’ (for the uninitiated, this means powerful and captivating).

So I considered it divine timing when Shark, a brand that creates a dupe of the Airwrap, reached out to see if I’d be interested in trialling its FlexStyle multi-styler. While the Dyson Airwrap will set you back an eyewatering $849, Shark’s offering retails at a much more reasonable $387, a pricepoint that’s seen the FlexStyle surge in popularity. But what does the FlexStyle offer, and how does it compare to the Airwrap? I gave it a whirl so you can make a truly informed decision before shelling out a silly amount of money on a tool my dad describes as “a monstrous-looking contraption”.

What is the Shark FlexStyle?

Designed to replace all your other styling tools, Shark’s FlexStyle is a no-heat multi-styler that “measures heat 1,000 times per second ensuring consistent air temperatures and no heat damage”, according to the brand. While I don’t get what this means in a technical sense, I do know that no heat damage can only be a positive.

The styler comes with five different attachments so you can do everything from blow drying to straightening and curling your hair. You just twist the attachments on to lock and unlock them in place and you control the temperature and airflow through the buttons on the side of the styler.

What are the differences between it and the Dyson Airwrap?

The FlexStyle has gone very viral on TikTok thanks to its similarity to the Dyson Airwrap, with many claiming it’s a perfect dupe for the much more expensive multi-styler. So how does the FlexStyle stack up? Compared to the Airwrap’s six attachments, the FlexStyle comes with five and only one size of curling barrel, whereas the Airwrap has two different sizes.

The most consistent difference people point out is that it’s easier to switch sides with the Airwrap’s curling barrels and that the Airwrap provides better, more well-formed curls. I found the few times I tried the Airwrap that while it was slightly easier to use the curling barrel attachments, the resulting curls didn’t look much different to the ones I achieved with the FlexStyle.

Putting it to the test

As a total amateur when it comes to multi-stylers, it took a fair bit of trial and error to figure out how to use all the different attachments. I had particular trouble getting the hang of using the curler attachments. They’re designed to auto-curl the hair, but until I watched the step-by-step tutorial on Shark’s website, I was having serious trouble getting my hair to wrap around the barrel.

From that point on, I referred to the tutorials when using each attachment and after a handful of times I started feeling much more skilled – and most importantly, the hairstyles I was able to create began to actually look really good.

The biggest revelation though has been the diffuser attachment for drying curly hair (despite having wavy/curly hair, I’ve never tried one of these before). I followed a TikTok curly hair tutorial and was astounded at the difference between air drying and drying my hair with the diffuser. My waves were transformed into defined, voluminous curls, and they stayed that way for several days.

If you’re thinking about investing in a multi-styler, the FlexStyle is an impressive product. Surprisingly, I’ve now become someone who uses this styling tool multiple times a week, which is a testament to how useful it is. Being able to recreate a salon-quality blow wave or a full head of sickeningly defined curls at home is something I never knew I needed, but now I have it, you’d have to pry my FlexStyle from my cold dead hands.

You can find out more about Shark’s FlexStyle here.