Abang Tech: Remington Keratin Protect review: High-end shine, mid-range price

Being able to get salon-quality style in the comfort of your own home, not to mention at a fraction of the time and cost, is the dream when looking for the best hair dryer. Remington’s Keratin Protect comes pretty close to making this dream a reality. With a great range of settings, it suits multiple hair types, and has clearly been designed to deliver a high shine for a low price – it retails for as little as £29.99.

Remington Keratin Protect review: What you need to know

The Remington Keratin Protect’s key feature is designed to both add shine and protect your hair from heat damage. Keratin and almond oils are infused into the ceramic-coated drying grille, and while this sounds like a canny bit of marketing, the results speak for themselves – this is a genuinely great hair dryer for those looking for glossy style without the high price tag.

It utilises a powerful 2,200W motor, and Remington claims that its ionic technology reduces frizz and static by releasing 90% more ions than one of its standard hair dryers. It doesn’t skimp on features and essentials, either: it comes with two nozzles and a diffuser, offers a wide range of heat and power settings, and its grey and rose gold design is attractive.

Remington Keratin Protect review: Price and competition

Its price fluctuated a fair bit while we were writing the review, dropping from £50 down to £30. In any case, the Remington Keratin Protect is a slightly more upmarket alternative to budget and travel dryers – namely the £30 BaByliss 2100 Salon Light and £11 TRESemmé Fast Dry 2000. And at its recent offer price of £29.99, it’s a mere tenth of the price of the expensive, yet brilliant, Dyson Supersonic. At full price, though, its closest rival in terms of features and performance is the Panasonic Nanoe.

Remington’s model has a more powerful motor than all of these rivals; accessories on par with its more expensive competitors; and an understated, traditional shape and design. It eschews the quirky design of the Dyson and Panasonic models, and produces better shine than the budget BaByliss and TRESemmé models. Our advice? Shop for the Panasonic and the Remington and buy whichever is cheaper.

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Remington Keratin Protect review: Design and key features

The Keratin Protect is a sleek-looking dryer. Its slim physique, rose-coloured grille and matte silver-coloured shell make it look much more expensive than it is. The pastel colour palette is a nice break from the shiny black hair dryers that have flooded the market. The only mild disappointment is that Remington has resorted to black plastic for the accessories and its buttons – which dulls the overall look somewhat.

It’s a relatively heavy hair dryer but that weight is evenly distributed so it doesn’t feel as heavy as it should. It’s not too bulky, either, which makes the Keratin Protect a decent hair dryer to take to the gym or away for the weekend. It’s much more portable than the chunky Panasonic Nanoe, for instance.

It’s not the quietest dryer, though. Granted, the decibel level increase is marginal in comparison to its rivals, but is worth noting if noise is a factor when looking for the best hair dryer.

The Keratin Protect offers three temperature settings, two power settings and a cold shot button. In our tests, the lowest heat setting combined with the highest power option was more than adequate for drying our hair. We tend to favour using the lowest or middle setting on high power because it helps create smooth styles and reduces frizz further. This is the perfect technique for handling fine hair which lacks volume, or making the most of dry, frizzy hair.

The cold shot on the Keratin Protect doesn’t feel that much cooler than the lowest heat setting, and is a little fiddly to press, so we barely used it. Cold shots help seal your style and adds more shine, but this wasn’t really needed with the Keratin Protect, which added a decent level of shine as standard.

Thankfully, all the buttons are well-positioned, well-designed and easy to use. They are each positioned in comfortable reach and you can switch between temperatures and power settings mid-dry, without having to think about what you’re doing.

Remington Keratin Protect review: Performance

The Keratin Protect took a little longer than others to dry our long, fine hair – over three minutes following a shower, and more than five minutes after swimming. This may not sound like long, but the Dyson Supersonic averaged 2mins 20secs to take our hair from sopping wet to bone dry in both scenarios. Even the £11 TRESemme took around three minutes for both.

The two drying tests (post-shower and post-swimming) were designed to not only test the hair dryer’s drying power when the hair had been fully submerged, they also served to show how the hair dryer affected our hair following contact with the chlorine in the water. Our hair is typically more dry/feels more damaged once we’ve styled it after swimming so it was a good test to see how the different hair dryers managed this.

The one benefit to the slower drying is that the hair is dried a little more gently, even on the hottest setting, meaning the Remington Keratin Protect does add the shine it promises. Even without the use of heat protectors or serums, and even after swimming. Plus, after a week of exclusive use, our hair seemed in better condition, suggesting the dryer also protects as advertised.

The included array of nozzles certainly do their bit to help. The Keratin Protect comes with a slim, 7mm concentrator nozzle, an 11mm fast-drying nozzle, and a diffuser. The slimmer of the two nozzles is great for styling your hair, but tends to get hot if you’re using it for long periods – this caused it to rotate a little during our testing. The fast-drying concentrator is invaluable, however: we used it for finishing our style and smoothing any rough edges, which meant we never needed to reach for the cold shot button.

The diffuser works well, too. It effectively distributed the heat to make our curls bouncy without requiring the use of lots of product; we found it worked best when adding volume to our straight styles by using it on our roots.

The Keratin Protect isn’t perfect, though. Its cable is a little shorter than we’d like, as it’s around half a metre shorter than most of its rivals at this price point – only the budget TRESemmé’s is shorter. It’s a little weightier than the others at 665g, and it’s also a noisy machine compared to the other dryers we’ve tested.

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Remington Keratin Protect review: Verdict

The Remington Keratin Protect ticks a lot of boxes, and its mid-range price makes it easy to wave away its various flaws. This is enhanced by the current offers on the Keratin Protect, which have dropped the price further. Yes, you can spend less on hair dryers that offer similar features, but they won’t add the shine you get from this Remington model, nor will they look as stylish.

Indeed, the areas in which the Keratin Protect stumbles – cable length, weight, noise and drying time – pale into insignificance when you see the results. And each of these negatives are relative. It’s unlikely you’ll get to use multiple hair dryers, so you won’t see any problem with them. The Keratin Protect is an incredibly easy hair dryer to use, and crucially it offers enough settings and accessories to cater for a wide range of hair types. At this price, that makes it a bit of a bargain in our book.