Stuff We Love: T3 SinglePass Whirl

Photo courtesy of Sephora

Confession: I am a total Harry Potter geek. I’ve seen all the movies (yes, occasionally in costume), and I recently started re-reading the books. I’m currently on the Goblet of Fire, in which our bushy-haired heroine Hermione gets a polished new ‘do courtesy of Sleekeazy’s Hair Potion. If Hermione were a real girl, I’d have told her she didn’t need a potion at all — she just needed to get her hands on the T3 SinglePass Whirl. This thing is like a magic wand for hair; after one try, I was ready to put my traditional curling iron in storage.

As with most T3s, the Whirl uses ionic, infrared energy to add shine and smoothness to hair; it also has an easy-to-read LCD display and adjustable temperature settings, and it heats up in a flash. But what really makes the Whirl unique is that it’s clipless and has a tapered barrel. I thought it might be unwieldy, but it’s actually the opposite: Once I got past the weirdness of styling my hair while wearing a single glove, MJ-style (the included glove acts as a barrier against the iron’s heat), it was surprisingly easy — fun, even. You simply pick up a section of hair and wrap it around the wand from the roots to the tip, rather than rolling it from the bottom up like with a regular curling iron. (Check out the video below for a more thorough how-to.)

The results? Forget Disney-princess, pageant-queen curls; this baby gives you ultra-glossy, boho-chic, perfectly imperfect waves that hold all day and look like you were born with them. Even better, the more uneven your sections, the prettier the effect will be — which is perfect for someone like me, who is both somewhat hair-lazy and perpetually in a hurry. Instead of hearing, “I love how you did your hair!”, you’ll just get, “Wow, you have great hair.” And if that’s not worth a pile of Galleons, I don’t know what is.

$130, available at Sephora.