Despite our complaints about how inconsistent the GHD Rise hot brush is, we must admit that it has become our go-to styler.
It’s versatile – adding volume to second-day hair; creating curls when going from day to night; adding natural-looking waves to the ends and creating bounce. It can even be used to straighten your hair, or at the very least it can help smooth frizz.
The GHD Rise is perfect if you’ve straightened your hair and it’s lacking any movement, or if you don’t want to wash your hair but want to style it by adding volume at the roots. This makes it look less limp and greasy. Our favourite thing to do is to very loosely curl the ends of our hair by just gently rolling the brush through the hair.
We feel like the GHD Rise has more appeal and versatility than the GHD Glide and will suit most hair types so if you’re undecided between the two, we recommend you buy the Rise.
If you have longer, bouncier hair you’ll likely not get a whole lot from the GHD Rise, but then you’ll likely not need to. If you’ve got thin, medium-length hair, you’ll find a lot of use for the GHD Rise. However, whether it’s £169-worth of use, we’re not convinced.
| GHD | £169 |
| Cult Beauty | £169 |
| Amazon | £169 |
In our GHD Rise hot brush review, we look at whether it can replace your curling tongs and if it’s really worth the money
Following the release of its GHD Helios in the Spring – and the limited-edition pink GHD Platinum Plus and Gold straighteners launch – the iconic UK hair brand GHD launched its first-ever volumising hot brush called GHD Rise.
It’s not the first hot brush from the brand – that title went to the GHD Glide – but it is its first barrelled hot brush designed to add volume and shine to your locks. Especially second-day styles.
In fact, GHD claims the GHD Rise hot brush creates “two times more volume” than naturally dried hair and that this volume and lift “lasts all day long.”
It costs £169 – so it’s only £20 cheaper than the brand’s most expensive straighteners (read more in our GHD Platinum Plus review) and is £30 more expensive than the GHD Glide – so we’ve spent the past three months putting it to the test as part of our GHD Rise hot brush review.
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The GHD Rise hot brush is said to deliver “kind-to-hair” styling and volume from root to tip, through a combination of SMART ultra-zone technology and 5mm nylon bristles for maximum root lift.
This ultra-zone with predictive technology was first seen on the GHD Platinum Plus and uses sensors to guarantee that the temperature stays at a constant 185℃. GHD believes this is the optimum styling temperature for hair and the sensors make sure that it never exceeds, or drops, below this across the GHD Rise’s 32mm barrel.
This not only protects the hair from unnecessary heat damage generally, but it also reduces the number of times you have to run the GHD Rise, or Platinum Plus, through your hair to get the desired effect. This further protects it from being over-styled.
As mentioned, the GHD Rise isn’t the first hot brush from GHD but it is the first barrelled brush. Its predecessor – the GHD Glide – is a paddle brush.
Instead of adding volume, it uses ceramic technology and ionising technology to smooth and tame hair, while eliminating frizz. This is perfect for smoothing naturally dried hair, adding a final sheen to blow-dried hair (without resorting to straighteners), or on second-day hair.
It has a combination of high-density shorter and longer bristles for larger sections of hair to be styled and the same automatic sleep mode. Both the GHD Rise and the GHD Glide have a 2.7-metre-long cable.
Although not a hot brush, GHD recently launched another potential GHD Rise hot brush alternative called GHD Duet Style. The Duet Style was the first in a new category of wet-to-dry stylers which, as the name suggests, take your hair from wet to dry.
Instead of using heated bristles, the Duet Style more closely resembles a pair of straighteners. Instead of just hot plates, though, the Duet Style uses built-in air vents to dry wet hair as the styler passes over individual sections.
Once the hair is dry, you can then press the Shine Shot mode which turns off the vents, turns on the plates, and effectively transforms the Duet Style into a Platinum Plus. You can read more in our GHD Duet Style review.
Since the GHD Duet Style launched, Dyson released its own wet-to-dry styler called the Dyson Airstrait. You can read more about how the two stylers compare in our GHD Duet Style vs Dyson Airstrait head-to-head.
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The 32mm barrel on the GHD Rise hot brush is said to be the perfect size to add body, fullness, and bounce through the lengths of hair while the GHD Rise’s 5mm smooth touch bristles have reportedly been optimised for closest contact to the root for maximum root lift.
It takes 25 seconds to heat up and it comes with the now-standard automatic 30-minute switch-off feature seen across the GHD range.
In trials, GHD claims that 9 out of 10 users agree that the GHD Rise creates instant volume, with 8/10 agreeing that it adds full-length body with fullness and bounce. You can also use the hot brush similarly to a curling tong or wand, to create waves, flicks and curls.
Despite the fact it seems like it should be a simple thing to use, it’s not immediately obvious how to achieve any desired looks with the GHD Rise hot brush.
Our GHD Rise tutorial below shows you how to do curls, which are the easiest of the three to master.
READ NEXT: How to curl hair with straighteners according to the experts at GHD and Trevor Sorbie
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Once you’ve got to grips with each of the methods listed above, the GHD Rise hot brush is not particularly difficult to use.
However, it is difficult to get any consistency to your curls, waves and volume. We’ve been using this almost daily for three months and yet our hair never looks the same. Despite using it the same way.
The right-side of our hair always looks great, yet the left rarely does. This isn’t the GHD Rise’s fault, of course, but it’s not something we’ve really experienced with our curling tongs or when we use our straighteners to curl our hair, so something must be amiss here.
We feel that the volume the GHD Rise offers actually looks a little too much; it does not look natural and bouncy. It made us look like we’d backcombed our hair but hadn’t brushed it out. This is far from the bounce we had been expecting.
We use the Revlon 2-in-1 Hot brush to dry our hair and this gives a much more natural lift and bounce. A substantial reason is because the barrel is so large. We found that the GHD Rise hot brush’s barrel is too thin and small to create the kind of bouncy volume we’d like. Similarly, it creates tight curls.
We’re not sure why GHD chose to make it so relatively narrow – maybe it’s because it was hoping to appeal to people with both long and short hair, but for us and our medium-length hair, we found it a little lacking.
In the three months we’ve been using it, we don’t think we’ve been particularly rough handed yet a number of the bristles have broken off. For £169, we’d expect a lot more.
Buy now from GHD
Despite our complaints about how inconsistent the GHD Rise hot brush is, we must admit that it is now our go-to styler. It’s versatile – adding volume to second-day hair; creating curls when going from day to night; adding natural-looking waves to the ends and creating bounce. It can even be used to straighten your hair, or at the very least it can help smooth frizz.
The GHD Rise is perfect if you’ve straightened your hair and it’s lacking any movement, or if you don’t want to wash your hair but want to style it by adding volume at the roots. This makes it look less limp and greasy.
Our favourite thing to do is to very loosely curl the ends of our hair by just gently rolling the brush through the hair.
If you’ve got thin, medium-length hair, you’ll find a lot of use for the GHD Rise. We also feel like the GHD Rise has more appeal and versatility than the GHD Glide and will suit most hair types. If you have longer, bouncier hair you’ll likely not get a whole lot from the GHD Rise, but then you’ll likely not need to.
Buy now from GHD
Victoria is founder and editor-in-chief of mamabella, freelance journalist and Mum. She has a passion for empowering people to feel beautiful whatever their age, size, skin type and budget
