Dough - Hairdryers

Sliced Bread

BBC

Health & Fitness

4.6 • 634 Ratings

🗓️ 1 August 2024

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

How do modern hairdryers protect against damage from excessive heat?

Dough is a new series from BBC Radio 4 which looks at the business behind profitable, everyday products and considers how they might evolve in the future.

In this episode, the entrepreneur Sam White speaks with experts from the world of hairdryer manufacturing, namely Robyn Coutts, a senior design manager at Dyson and Andrew McDougall, director of beauty and personal care research at the analysts, Mintel.

Also joining them is the technology expert and applied futurist Tom Cheesewright, who offers his insight and predictions on what might be coming beyond the current production pipeline.

Together, they explore how hairdryers went from gas-powered chimneys to handheld devices, examine some of the latest trends and technology before giving their expert opinions on game-changing - and pointless - hair drying innovations.

Dough looks at where the smart money's going now and what that could mean for all of us in the years ahead.

Produced by Viant Siddique and Jon Douglas.

Dough is a BBC Audio North production for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds.

Sliced Bread returns for a new batch of investigations in August when Greg Foot will investigate more of the latest so-called wonder products to find out whether they really are the best thing since sliced bread.

In the meantime, Dough is available in the Sliced Bread feed on BBC Sound

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, podcast fan.
0:03.0	Consider this your invite to the UK's biggest podcasting party.
0:06.7	We're heading to Sheffield from the 4th to the 6th of July
0:09.0	for the BBC Sounds Fringe at the Crossed Wires Festival.
0:12.8	We'll be joined by some of the biggest names in podcasting,
0:15.3	including Sarah Cox, Charlie Hedges, Russell Kane,
0:18.4	and some bloke called Greg James doing his Radio 4 show called Rewinder.
0:23.2	You can watch live shows of your favourite podcasts, and the best part is free.
0:28.0	To book your free tickets, go to crossedwires.org slash fringe.
0:34.4	BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts.
0:45.9	Hello and welcome to Doe, the BBC Radio 4 series where we look at profitable everyday products and consider how they might evolve in the future.
0:50.1	I'm Sam White, an entrepreneur that's always up for a chat with industry insiders, and we're going to hear from some of them on how our chosen product has developed, the business behind it, and then get some ideas on where it might go next.
1:04.0	This episode is all about something many of us use, but when it first appeared back in 1888, it wasn't the handheld portable version we know of today.
1:14.7	I'm talking about the hair dryer.
1:19.2	I'm not in this alone. I have Tom Cheesewright with me. He's a technology expert and applied
1:24.7	futurist. Tom, how are you doing? Good, thanks Sam. We've been doing lots of research
1:29.1	for this episode because sadly I don't get much practical experience with hairdries anymore.
1:33.9	Ah, you're referring to the fact that you have quite short hair. Suffering from follicle
1:39.0	deforestation. Well, I'm quite short-haired myself, so between the two of us, we're going to struggle a little bit here then.
1:46.4	So what was the first hair dryer like then, Tom?
1:49.6	Hard to imagine based on our current models. If you think about a sort of wood-burning stove, it actually was gas-powered, and the flu that comes out the top of it, imagine opening that out and sticking your head into it,
2:01.1	potentially taking your hair off as much as drying your hair. But the women of late 1880s, France,
	...

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