Whenever I see a high school student on TikTok scribbling away at how to create the perfect beach wave with a Dyson Airwrap curling iron, I think back to when my mom straightened my curled hair on the kitchen ironing board before my middle school dance in the 1990s. Or when my first ConAir straightener, bought with money saved from a summer job, only got hotter and made me look like the lead singer of a hair metal band. Or when I tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to gain the dexterity and fine motor skills needed to operate the clamps on a Hot Tools curling iron in my dorm room my freshman year of college. The Dyson Airwrap is my version of the time I used to walk to school in the snow, uphill both ways. As I rapidly approach 40, it’s proof that young people today are naive.
TikTok is awash with tutorials featuring $600 hair tools and their ilk. Hairstyling is just the beginning of TikTok’s love affair with gadgets and gadgets. After wrapping hair in Airwrap, you can prep your face for makeup with red light, remove hairs with a home hair follicle remover, and make a salad with a vegetable chopper. The chatty, short-form recommended videos that have proliferated on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram are all algorithmically targeted to different interests and demographics, helping to guide shoppers to a swarm of new tools designed to help with household and personal care tasks traditionally thought of as women’s work. Some of these devices, like Dyson’s hair tools and Dr. Dennis Gross’s at-home LED mask, cost hundreds of dollars. Others, like personal milk frothers and powered cleaning brushes, are considerably less expensive.
These products are reversing the fortunes of the gadget concept. Technology industry watchers and commentators have been wondering for years whether the end of the gadget age is near. After all, cell phones have eliminated most people’s demand for many of the consumer technology products that until recently filled electronics store shelves: GPS systems, digital cameras, CD and DVD players, iPods. After a brief recovery during the pandemic as Americans stocked up on ring lights, game consoles, and tablets to entertain their kids, traditional consumer electronics companies are facing a slump in demand. But not in all parts of the market. On the contrary, we’re in the golden age of gadgets for girls.
Dyson, which launched its wildly popular and very expensive vacuum cleaner in the US in 2002, has made a big contribution in recent years to convincing other brands that women might actually be interested in tech gadgets, or that engineering advances could be a selling point for a typically female product. After conquering the vacuum cleaner market, Dyson launched a series of electric fans and motion-sensing hand dryers that, while useful, were not the kind of products that would appeal to the masses. Then in 2016 came a product that seemed a bit outlandish at the time: Dyson’s Supersonic hair dryer. It was the first of three new products that reinvented the basic physical reality of a mundane hair styling tool. The Airwrap followed in 2018, and the cordless curling iron was released in 2020. All three were big hits, especially with the affluent, young female demographic that drives beauty trends online. Hair tools now account for nearly a third of Dyson’s US business.
In tech jargon, a gadget is a piece of hardware. A smartphone is probably a gadget, but none of the apps on it are gadgets. In more traditional terms, a gadget is a device with a narrow scope of use, usually designed to perform or simplify a specific task. Not all gadgets are tech products, but many are the result of certain types of technology becoming cheaper to manufacture and more widely available to the average person. The idea that women would buy tech products that take their needs seriously is so obvious that it feels a little silly to even bother to explain it, and yet tech companies seem to deny it time and time again, or simply forget about it. The industry is dominated by men, and that influences which new ideas gain traction and which products are passed over for improvement. Sure, some gadgets in the past were designed with women and girls in mind, most obviously the tools we use in the kitchen. But the gadget boom that coincided with personal computing didn’t take the home and personal care realm into account. The hair iron I struggled to learn how to use in college was called a Marcel iron. It was so named because its complex hinge clamp mechanism was virtually unchanged from one patented in 1905 by hairdresser Marcel Grateau.
Dyson’s success in capitalizing on demand for improved vacuums and hair tools may reflect its ability to identify stagnant markets and consumers ready to buy, rather than the company’s ability to innovate. Or rather, markets that were once stagnant. Dyson announced at the end of 2022 that it would invest about $600 million over the next four years to develop 20 new beauty devices. Competition for these devices is expected to be much fiercer than it was just a few years ago. Dyson’s existing hair tools alone have spawned enough knockoffs and knockoffs to fuel a home industry of tutorials and recommendations. In the case of the Airwrap, this cycle has been going on for more than a year. New, very similar tools appear on TikTok Shop, Amazon, and Temu, presumably at a new lower price or with novel attachments. Influencers often receive products for free (and sometimes are paid extra cash) so they can try them out. They create demo videos promising that this is actually the best dummy and provide shopping links that generate commissions. Small creators and regular users buy the new things that are becoming popular and post their own reviews. Many of them are hoping that their accounts will gain more visibility while people try to understand what this new thing is that’s suddenly everywhere.
Much the same story is playing out elsewhere on the internet. On CleanTok, where creators swap household tips and tricks, there are seemingly endless links to battery-powered scrub brushes of all sizes and lengths, all from companies with the enigmatic Amazon brand name, and all touting the ease of keeping your kitchen or bathroom clean. Skin-care buffs have found a range of devices that, for under $10, promise to shine red light onto your face to create a “toned” jawline. Fitness influencers extol the benefits of compact steppers and walking pads that can be tucked under standing desks. I’ve seen plenty of close-ups of hairless armpits, thanks to Ulike’s at-home epilator.
What gadgets of all kinds promise beyond the specific task they are intended to perform is ease. To some extent, most of these new gadgets marketed to women usually make it easier to meet certain beauty or household standards. With less time and skill required for a perfect hairstyle and less effort expended on making bathroom fixtures sparkle, potential buyers have the possibility of finally going for it all. Perhaps most importantly, these gadgets offer the possibility of relief, if not from the standards themselves, then from the feeling that meeting them all is impossible.
But convenience never lasts long when adherence to cultural standards is at stake. When current expectations become too easy to achieve, they change. Consumer history is rife with examples of how exactly this happens. In her book Never Done: A History of American Housework, historian Susan Strasser traces how household equipment evolved over the course of industrialization, finding both intended and unintended consequences. For example, electric washing machines made laundry less physically demanding in the home and more productive. They also changed where and how laundry was situated in women’s lives. Laundry became less communal and more isolated in the home. The ease of use of electric washing machines also changed hygiene standards, requiring clothes to be washed more frequently. Over time, what was once a reluctant weekly chore became a constant burden. Strasser found little evidence that women spent any less time doing laundry.
Technological innovations in household and personal care, even if they reduce the physical strength and skill required for some of the female workforce, tend not to translate into more leisure or personal time for women. Instead, they invite even heavier expectations of domestic and beauty performance. The effects that many of these devices promise are the kind that, until recently, only the wealthy enjoyed, and therefore are not what most people naturally expect. Your hair will look freshly blow-dried, your skin will look like it’s been treated by a cosmetic dermatologist, and your house will look like you have a maid. You can watch the bar of expectations rise in real time on social media as young women figure out how to groom themselves and organize their living spaces. Ideas of how perfect your skin should look or how tidy your home should be get more and more outlandish, and things that gadgets can’t yet replicate, like Botox, cheek fat removal, expensive home renovations, and adherence to rapidly changing furniture trends, become the new norm among the wealthy and influential. No matter how hard you run, the finish line is always a little further away.
