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I've been shopping for hair dryers and in all malls I've been to the salespeople explained how the "ionizing" hair dryers are better than the ones without that function, because it makes your hair less frizzy. I have been able to talk four of about twelve of them to come clean with me and tell me if they actually knew the science behind that, and they said they didn't really know how that works, but they were instructed to tell that to customers to sell more of these new, more expensive dryers.

Reading up a bit on how the fans and dryers work, turns out they tend to make the air passing through them leave electrons on the encasing, and the air coming out of them is slightly positively charged. So to negate that, hair dryers have negative ion generators like YFA-114 variants from Youji.

I have been drying my hair with the old non-ionizing and the new ionizing dryers and I haven't noticed any difference with my hair length (~15cm). Maybe it matters more with longer hair, but I asked girls with longer hair to try these out and they said they didn't notice any difference between them either. Maybe my hair dryer doesn't have a working ionizing element, maybe we're just not seeing the difference, or maybe it's just a marketing trick.

There's also an awkward situation when sometimes you want to get more volume in your hair, so you'd want to turn off the negative ionizer. I've seen some hair dryers on the internet stores have a switch for it, but most don't, leaving you less options. If so many people would have bought those dryers and had problems with achieving volume, you'd think it would be something people talked about, but that's not the case. Perhaps because there's no actual difference at all.

Do these fans actually ionize anything? Is it really helping reduce hair frizziness? If it doesn't work, why not, and how would it work in theory?

WhatRoughBeast
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user1306322
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  • Yes, you can sell them for higher price margins. – PlasmaHH Nov 01 '16 at 15:23
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    On the mane, this is more of a physics or biology question than an electronics question. – Spehro Pefhany Nov 01 '16 at 15:30
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    What's the relative humidity where you are? If it's dry enough to create sparks when you pet the cat, there might be a difference. –  Nov 01 '16 at 15:30
  • There are claims that it results in faster drying of hair, thus less damage. Not sure I can see how that would work. – Spehro Pefhany Nov 01 '16 at 15:48
  • I saw a teardown of the Dyson hair dryer. It does have some kind of ion generator inside it, but I can't vouch for whether it delivers on marketing promises. Please note, logically, if the ionizer makes no difference, then it follows that there is no need for a switch to turn it on and off (except maybe for marketing). – user57037 Nov 01 '16 at 16:14
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    is that a noisy ionizing dryer or an annoizing dryer? – Tony Stewart EE75 Nov 01 '16 at 16:35
  • Ask Donald what he uses. Amazing hair that guy has. :) – F. Bloggs Nov 01 '16 at 17:29
  • I would have thought the ionizer would reduce flyaway hair rather than frizziness. However, I keep my hair about 1/2 inch long, so I can't speak from personal experience. – Andrew Morton Nov 01 '16 at 19:03

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All you need is alternating HV switch between pins to create a flood of +/- ions to neutralize static in dry hair. In wet hair, it makes little difference. 1Hz or faster is adequate at 1pps to allow charger to build up hiV at 1kV/mm min from sharp tungsten pins or SS needles.

Dry air from p-p or point to point BDV or breakdown voltage at sealevel is ~1kV/mm then rises to 3kV/mm for plane-plane. It reduces < 1kV/mm with dust and humidity.

We used these in clean rooms to make dust fall to floor but they arc at broad spectrum with recursive notches in spectrum matching wavelength in the gap and screwed up EMI in our magnetic disk servo writers so they got tossed in the garbage.

The so-called negative ion ionzers may not work if the tribo-electric voltage or static voltage is not positive static from the compatible materials of plastic brushes and hair. I would suggest they cannot balance the charge and only alternating voltage ionizers can work effectively.

Normally electrons escape from the better "conductor" of the two "insulators". to create a positive static voltage when energized by friction. this is ion flow analysis 101... ;)

Tony Stewart EE75
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