Hair dryers are common small appliances at home. In recent years, hair dryers have become more and more fashionable in appearance and smaller in size. Among them, many hair dryers can be purchased for only tens of yuan, or even more than ten yuan. However, these hair dryers that look fashionable and cheap actually hide a lot of safety hazards.
Stylish appearance and cheap price
Hidden safety hazards
Compared with previous years, the price of today's hair dryers has dropped further, especially some compact "mini" hair dryers, which are already less than 50 yuan. The reporter also investigated the hair dryer products sold on the e-commerce platform and found that there are more hair dryer brands here, with relatively richer styles and more diversified prices. The price of many products does not exceed 50 yuan, but these cheap "mini" Does a hair dryer have the safety attributes that a household appliance should have? The reporter randomly purchased 10 hair dryers on several e-commerce platforms, with prices ranging from 15 to 50 yuan, and tested them at a testing agency.
Test engineers told reporters that according to the national mandatory standard "Special Requirements for Safe Skin and Hair Care Appliances for Household and Similar Electrical Appliances", when considering the safety of a hair dryer, in addition to considering the normal working status, it is also necessary to consider the common conditions of this appliance. Whether it can still be done safely in abnormal working conditions.
Reporters learned that a hair dryer is mainly composed of a motor, a fan blade and an electric heating element. The motor rotates to drive the fan blade and send out the heat generated by the electric heating element to achieve the purpose of drying and grooming hair. However, if the motor is damaged and cannot realize the function of air supply and heat dissipation, the electric heating element may continue to generate heat at this time. Under such abnormal working conditions, the hair dryer should not cause danger. National standards require that during the test, the appliance should not emit flames, molten metal, or dangerous amounts of toxic or ignitable gases, and the product shell should not be deformed to cause leakage.
test engineers strictly followed the test methods required by the standard and disconnected the motor to limit heat dissipation conditions. The reporter saw that the hair dryer emitted thick smoke in the 30th second of the test.
At the 45th second of the test, the reporter saw that the hair dryer had caught fire and quickly melted the plastic casing.
This hair dryer was tested after simulating motor damage. It caught fire faster, with flames coming out in only about 15 seconds.
After abnormal working tests, the reporter found that 4 of the 10 hair dryers tested smoked and caught fire.
Reporters learned that, generally speaking, hair dryers need to install temperature control devices to avoid dangers caused by excessive temperature. This long metal piece is the temperature control device of the hair dryer. After the environment reaches the rated temperature, it will disconnect the power supply, and after the temperature drops, it will automatically connect the power supply. After taking apart several hair dryers, test engineers found that none of the hair dryers burned in these tests were equipped with temperature control devices.
Based on some usage habits in consumers’ lives, test engineers also conducted safety tests on the hair dryer such as stretching and bending the power cord to check the durability of the power cord. In the power cord tensile test of this product, the longitudinal displacement of the cord exceeded the standard requirement of 2 mm. Test engineers told reporters that long-term use can easily expose the metal wires inside the power cord, posing a risk of electric shock. For some products, after the bending test, the wires inside the power cord were broken in half.
Among the 10 hair dryers purchased by this reporter, 2 are old-fashioned hair dryers and 8 are mini internet celebrity hair dryers. After the test, it was found that 4 mini hair dryers emitted flames during the abnormal working test; 2 mini hair dryers did not meet the standard requirements in the safety test of the power cord.
Similar appearance, different price
Product materials are "troublesome"
In recent years, in addition to the pursuit of performance, the fashion trend of hair dryers has become more and more obvious in terms of fashion, simplicity and miniaturization.However, during the investigation, the reporter found that the prices of hair dryers with similar appearance are very different, and some wholesale prices are even less than ten yuan.
Hammer hair dryer is the latest hot product on the market, but its price ranges from several hundred yuan to tens of yuan and even to more than ten yuan. The reporter investigated a wholesale website and found that the lowest wholesale price of the same hair dryer was only 6.5 yuan.
Relevant industry insiders told reporters that this is actually a very common phenomenon of plagiarism in the industry. As long as a hair dryer with a novel style and hot sales appears on the market, a large number of products with almost the same appearance will appear within a month or two, but the price will be much lower. The person in charge of a hair dryer company told reporters that they are cheaper because of the different materials used.
The reporter learned from the testing agency that this is actually a sign of cutting corners. If the material of the casing is poor, it may be made of recycled materials, and the made casing costs less than 1 yuan; the motor may use the cheapest pure aluminum wires, and the wires may also be non-standard. The number and thickness of the copper wires inside are different. Regular power cords are different. Using these materials to make a hair dryer, the overall cost of a product is less than 5 yuan. Relevant industry insiders told reporters that this kind of cost reduction on various accessories may cause various problems in the products produced.
During the hair dryer abnormal working test, many products smoked and caught fire, all because they wanted to save the cost of temperature control devices. The reporter checked relevant websites and found that the temperature control component of a hair dryer costs between 0.6 and 1.5 yuan, but for some companies, this is already an important profit point. The reporter saw that the internal accessories of many hair dryers actually have reserved positions for temperature control devices, but they were not installed during the production process.
A large number of "white label" products have flowed into e-commerce platforms
In addition to cutting corners, some hair dryer companies also sell a large number of unbranded products on e-commerce platforms, which also poses a threat to consumers' personal and property safety.
The reporter learned that in fact, many hair dryer companies also produce products without brands, which are called "neutral packaging" or "white label" products in the industry. They either OEM them themselves or wholesale them to other operators, and most of them get them. E-commerce platform sales. The person in charge of a company revealed that this kind of product can be customized according to needs. If the quantity is large, it can be wholesaled for more than 6 yuan. If you want a webpage promotion picture, you will need to add 9 yuan. 3C certification can also be provided. However, such "white label" hair dryer products generally do not have temperature control devices installed.
Ye Hanxiang, senior engineer at SGS-CSTC Standards Technical Services Co., Ltd.: Safety is actually the first priority. No matter how good your function is, if you cannot guarantee safety, this product is meaningless at all, and it will also cause great danger.
The reporter learned that the retail sales of the hair dryer market in 2021 will reach 5.38 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 10.7%, and the retail volume will be more than 27 million units, a year-on-year increase of 0.3%. But the reporter also found that the quality data of hair dryer products is not optimistic.
The latest household appliance supervision spot inspection by the State Administration for Market Regulation shows that the unqualified rate of skin and hair care appliances is 6.8%. Special spot inspections of skin and hair care appliances in Shandong, Henan, Shanxi and other provinces have also reached a failure rate of 6.8%. 25%, 10%, 11.1%. Most of the unqualified products were hair dryers. The Guangdong Provincial Market Supervision Department's "Quality Supervision and Spot Inspection of Clean and Sanitary Electrical Appliances Products" shows that among the 73 unqualified products, hair dryer products accounted for 48, accounting for 60% of the total number of unqualified products, among which Many projects involve electrical safety.
Source: CCTV News
Reprinted from: People’s Daily Client
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