A couple years ago, Dyson’s New Product Innovation team started buying up human hair, by the tress-ful. A single tress of human hair is not a large amount—it’s about 1.5 inches wide and 16 inches long—but when all was said and done, Dyson engineer Annmarie Nicolson says the tech company had used 1,010 miles of human hair. That’s enough to stretch from the northernmost tip of California down past the Mexican border.

Dyson bought all these strands because, after years of building vacuums, hand dryers, fans, and air purifiers, the company has decided to make a hair dryer. Dyson doesn’t do half-hearted product development (we’ve noted previously the company’s tendency to over-engineer), and testing its high-tech hair dryer on miles of human hair was essential to getting the device ready for market. Four years after its conception, it’s ready: the British electronics company unveiled the Dyson Supersonic hair dryer today. It will become available in the United States later this fall, through Sephora.

Dyson

The Supersonic is only available in Japan for now, but I saw it a couple months ago at a preview event Dyson held at a hotel in Soho in New York City. By its looks and its specs, the Supersonic is every inch a Dyson product. It's small for a hair dryer, about the size of a travel one, but is packed with technology like Dyson’s Air Multiplier feature, a digital motor, and heat sensors. Like other Dyson products that reimagine a basic household appliance, the Supersonic isn’t instantly recognizable for what it is. A grill and a nozzle typically bookend the barrel of a hair dryer, but with the Supersonic there’s just a rounded, hollow space that, improbably, emits enough hot air to dry hair. Like other Dyson wares, it’s also expensive: the Supersonic costs $400.

Anyone familiar with Dyson’s roster of products will notice that the Supersonic shares its aesthetic with the line of bladeless fans the company debuted in 2009. The tech is the same, too: as mentioned, the Supersonic features Dyson's Air Multiplier technology, which uses a motor and tiny jets to blow a thin sheet of air, rather than the big, choppy gusts you'd typically get from blades. With the fans, this created less noise. With the hair dryer, Dyson’s engineers think it will encourage beautiful, healthier hair. Their thinking is based on loads of research, starting with images of hair taken with a scanning electron microscope. Under a microscope, Nicolson says you can see the geometric differences in different hair types. “If you look at Caucasian hair, the cross-section of the hair is circular,” she says. “Japanese hair, the shape is elliptical. When you apply turbulent air flow, Caucasian hair tends to tangle and get knotted much easier than Japanese hair, which aligns a lot better.” Dyson needed to design for the most difficult denominator—in this case, the less dense, circular strands typical to people of European descent. Because Air Multiplier technology was designed to reduce turbulence, the company claims the Supersonic's tightly controlled air flow should keep those strands from tangling.

Dyson

The heat that comes out of a hair dryer, as anyone who uses one knows, is both what dries your hair and damages it. Your typical drugstore hair dryer likely has settings for hot, warm, and cold air; when on hot, heat can climb past what’s thought to be ideal for drying hair, and into temperatures that fry and damage hair cuticles. During testing, the engineers used thermal cameras to watch how prototype hair dryers dispensed heat over strands, and over time. In practice, the final Supersonic has heat sensors built in next to the airflow jets that will take the air’s temperature 20 times per second, and send that data to a built-in microprocessor. If temperatures rise too much, the Supersonic can level itself out. All of this is powered by a V9—a newer, smaller version of Dyson’s prized digital motors.

According to Dyson’s press team, the company spent $71 million developing the Supersonic, and has over 100 patents pending on the technology. That’s a massive investment, even by Dyson’s standards, but there’s a growing appetite for high-quality hair dryers. People love the Harry Josh Pro Dryer 2000, a tool that makes shelling out $300 for a hair dryer seem worth it, so long as you come out with shinier, healthier locks. The Supersonic is also the company’s most mainstream product to date. Personal hair dryers are far more ubiquitous than, say, vacuums, and that’s not counting places like salons and gyms that keep several of the hair styling tools on hand. James Dyson’s plan for his company is to expand beyond the niche and high-end. As we noted last year, "he wants to build a full-blown technology company, one that reaches into our houses in ways you can only guess.” If that's going to happen, the bathroom counter isn't a bad next step.