Dyson Zone review: These air

By Tyler Chin

If the home tech gods over at Dyson had simply broken into the noise-cancelling headphone category, that would've been major news in and of itself. But the brand's latest innovation, the Dyson Zone, is more than just an audio device—it's also a portable air purifier. Sure, Dyson's produced air purifiers before (and they're great!) but it's now taken that technology baked into its tower and tabletop fans and compressed it so you can go ahead and wear an air purifier, uh…directly on your face.

The Dyson Zone was expressly designed for these heavily pollinated, painfully polluted times, helping customers — presumably deep-pocketed ones — breathe in cleaner air and tune out the world. While the Zone has been in development for six years, pre-dating COVID-19, customers who are suddenly versed in all things airborne-transmitted diseases will surely see the appeal of the gadget. The headphones look perfectly normal, but it's the visor that attaches to the earcups and covers your face that makes it kind of a crazy, Transformer-esque invention. We took the Dyson Zone for a test run, and, well, it was a hell of a ride.

We'll dive into the most absurd aspect of the Zone, ostensibly what you all came to read about, which is the wearable air purifier that sits in front of your mouth and nose. The Zone's visor magnetically attaches to the headphones and over your face, which is where clean, purified air is fanned directly into the user's mouth and nose. The visor doesn't actually sit touching your face directly, which is great for someone who doesn't want the equivalent of a high-tech mask sandwiched against their face in summer.

Blessedly, you can choose between three fan speeds for pumping air at your visage, which will be nice on the swampiest days of the year. The air doesn't smell (or taste) like anything, and I can't tell you how many fewer pollutants I ingested, but as an allergy sufferer who's really going through it this season, I didn't sneeze once. So either my Clarityn is finally kicking in, or the earcups, which house the dual air filters — one for pollutants as small as 0.1 microns and one for gases and odors — are actually helping to ensure that pollen stays squarely out of my business.

The visor only works when attached to the headset, and it flips downward when you want to talk or sip your coffee. Doing so made me feel like a 14th-century knight challenging someone to a duel, and it just sort of hangs there in front of your face until you're hankering for another whoosh of clean, purified air. Your audio and airflow automatically pause as soon as you pull the visor down, which is a nice hand's-free touch that means you're not fumbling with buttons just to explain what the hell you're wearing on your face to another stranger on the train.

You could also try to make yourself heard while wearing the visor, but you can imagine it's a bit like attempting to speak in a wind tunnel. I also learned the hard way that you need to remove the visor before taking off the headphones, otherwise the whole attachment falls off. Thankfully, the thing didn't break, and I didn't have to take out a loan to pay anyone at Dyson back, but something to note!

After taking off the visor, I could fully soak in the experience of listening to Dyson's first pair of headphones. The active noise-cancellation is some of the best around, and the low distortion of the Zone makes you feel like you're listening to music in a recording studio. The earcups are pretty massive, though, making Apple's AirPod Max headphones look minuscule. Part of me was worried that the headphones would be heavy, but clocking in at 1.3 pounds sans visor, they weren't as skull-crushing as I expected. They're by no means light — compared to a popular model such as the Bose 700 headphones, which weigh a teensy nine ounces — but the Zone is still comfortable to wear. Anyone who owns over-the-head headphones knows the feeling of putting them around their neck when they're not in use, but the Zone's giant earcups don't lend themself well to the universal resting position — they're just too big and can almost feel like they're choking you.

One of the best features of the Dyson Zone is the joystick that's built into the headphones to control your music. It's much more intuitive and satisfying to use than something like the Bang & Olufsen Beoplay H9's touch interface, and it offers the ability to fast-forward through a song without having to take out your phone to do so. It's a tiny detail that offers some great user experience and a massive upgrade over standard button controls.

I modelled the Dyson Zone for a large group of people, and the consensus was that the device transforms anyone wearing it into a dorkier iteration of the Batman villain Bane (specifically, the Tom Hardy version). That's objectively not a great look for the average person traversing the city, and if I didn't know what the Zone was, I'd probably cross the street if I noticed someone near me with one on. There's also something deeply vulnerable and impractical about wearing something this absurd on the rough-and-tumble streets of New York, even in a place where everyone has truly seen it all.

Taking into consideration all the specifics, we're going to go ahead and say that 2023 is not the year of the Dyson Zone. We just can't imagine seeing someone on the street wearing it and being taken seriously. Plus, we can't say that the air filtration bonus is quite enough to sell the £750 price tag. (We're not scientists here, but you're probably better off just wearing an FFP2 mask that fully covers your nose and mouth if you're super concerned about filtering pollutants out of your airstream).

That's not to say this isn't a worthwhile product from Dyson… in the next decade or so. Considered alone, this is a great pair of headphones, and we would recommend it wholeheartedly if it weren't for the sky-high price tag, which of course accounts for the air-purifying capabilities. If Dyson were to make a standalone pair of headphones and cut the price by more than half, then they'd definitely be a contender for the best ANC headphones around. But until then, you'll have to be fully in the Zone to enjoy Dyson's latest.