PAX Plus Review: The Dyson Hair Dryer of Vaporisers

The Hook: The Dyson Argument

The Dyson Supersonic costs £330.

A perfectly good Remington costs £30. Same job. Same result. Wet hair goes in, dry hair comes out. If you're running spec-sheet comparisons, the Dyson loses embarrassingly.

And yet Dyson sells millions.

Because specs aren't the point. The point is how it feels in your hand. The point is how it looks sitting on your bathroom shelf. The point is that when your mate spots it, they don't ask "what's that?" — they ask "is that a Dyson?" with a hint of respect.

The PAX Plus is that argument, translated into vaporiser form. It's not the best vaporiser. The vapour quality doesn't touch the Mighty+. The extraction efficiency loses to devices half its price. If you're doing performance-per-pound calculations, the Plus fails embarrassingly.

At £130, you could have an XMAX V3 Pro (£79.99) and £50 left over for a nice dinner. You could put the difference towards a Crafty+ (£186.99) and be £57 short, which is a real gap rather than a rounding error. You could have a Solo 2 MAX (£128.99) — effectively the same money — with better vapour and a glass path.

But none of those devices fit into skinny jeans unnoticed. None of them look like an MP3 player when security glances at your bag. None of them sit on a coffee table without screaming "VAPORISER" to anyone who walks past.

The PAX Plus does.

Sarah bought herself a Dyson hair dryer last year. I judged her for it — the Boots own-brand would dry her hair just as well for a tenth of the price. Then I bought a PAX Plus. We don't discuss this anymore.

We stock the PAX Plus at HerbVape.co.uk while stock lasts — details and pricing below.

Vapour Quality 7/10

Let's get this out of the way: the PAX Plus produces adequate vapour, not exceptional vapour. It's a pure conduction device in a world that's moved to hybrid and convection heating, and that gap shows in every session.

The vapour is smooth. The flavour is present. The experience is pleasant. It's like a mid-range hotel — not bad, not memorable, effortlessly adequate. You're not going to forget your Mighty+ after a session with the Plus. You're not going to tell your mates about the flavour. You're going to have a perfectly fine session and move on with your evening.

The Plus is a sipper. Slow, cigar-style pulls — let the conduction oven do its work, don't rush it. If you try to rip it like a bong, you'll get weak vapour and a mouthful of hot air. "Sip it, don't rip it" as PAX themselves say, and they're not wrong.

The four Experience Modes give you range without precision, and PAX have never published a degree figure for any of them — the numbers below are measured and community-agreed rather than official. Stealth Mode (~182°C) keeps clouds invisible. Efficiency Mode (~193°C) stretches a bowl. Flavour Mode (~204°C) is where I live 80% of the time — best balance of taste and clouds. Boost Mode (~216°C) finishes bowls properly, but flavour has packed up and left by that point.

On pure vapour quality, the Plus vapes like a device that costs half what it does. That's the honest summary and it's why this number is a 7 and not a point higher. But the Plus doesn't live in your hand — it lives in your pocket. And that's the deal you're making.

The Strain Test

Dyson's whole trick is airflow, and airflow is precisely the thing PAX never got round to fixing on this one — so the benchmark is a fair place to find out what that costs. Same two jars as every other device on this site, same grinder, same scales, oven brushed and screen popped between strains. The Plus has to answer a simple question: when you strip the aluminium away, what's actually coming out of the hole?

Jack Herer — Sativa

The Flower: Same jar as every other device on this site. Haze × (Northern Lights #5 × Shiva Skunk), around 20% THC, terpinolene-led with caryophyllene and pinene behind it. Pale, spindly, hairy stuff that looks less impressive than it smokes — crack the jar and it's pine needles and lemon peel first, dry green herbs underneath, black pepper right at the back. Old-school in the way that means "aromatic", not "weak". It's the strain that shows you up: the top notes are fragile, and if a vaporiser can't hold them you find out in the first three seconds.

The Pack: 0.35g, fine grind, full oven, tamped firm and level with the included tool. Pack pressure matters more on this device than the mode you pick — a loose load channels down the middle and scorches the edges, and you'll taste that before you taste the strain. Half-pack lid left in the drawer for a full load.

Low Temp (193°C): Efficiency Mode, two petals, and the coldest useful setting on the thing — Stealth is too cool to pull a real reading from this flower. Draw one gives pine needles and lemon peel, thin but legible, with a citrus lift sitting on the exhale. Draw two holds most of it. By draw three the walls have soaked through and the lift has thinned into general green herb, and draws four and five are dry herbs with pepper already elbowing forward. Five draws, two of them genuinely good.

Mid Temp (204°C): Flavour Mode, three petals, and the name is optimistic by this point in the bowl. Black pepper turns up properly defined and stays — pepper is the durable heart of this flower and hot walls have never had any trouble with it. Woody haze underneath, a bit of dry earth behind that, and the density finally arrives. Five draws, all consistent, none of them telling me anything. This is where it stops being Jack and starts being warm green herb with spice.

High Temp (216°C): Boost Mode, four petals, and the ceiling. Earth and toasted herb, a thread of leather on the last of it. Four draws and the load is spent, evenly mid-brown right through, which at least confirms the oven heats consistently even when it isn't doing anything interesting.

The Verdict: Fourteen draws, roughly seven minutes, and two of them were the strain. Better than the PAX Mini 2's restricted oven, well short of what the PAX 4 does with the same jar. The bright end is the casualty of the heating type rather than a fault in this particular unit — hot walls blend where a convection heater layers, and no amount of anodising changes that. Dyson put their whole engineering budget into moving air properly. PAX put theirs into how the thing feels in your palm, and on this strain you can taste exactly where the money went.

Wedding Cake — Indica-Leaning Hybrid

The Flower: Same jar as every other device on this site. Triangle Kush × Animal Mints, via Triangle Mints #23 — around 24% THC, caryophyllene first, then limonene and myrcene. Dense, squat, greasy nuggets that leave your fingers tacky and your grinder needing a wash. Nose is vanilla and cream over sweet raw dough, with a peppery earth underneath and a cherry-berry edge that turns up on the exhale more than the sniff. Modern dessert genetics doing exactly what it says on the tin. Where Jack exposes a device, this one flatters it.

The Pack: 0.35g again, ground a shade coarser because the greasy stuff compresses harder than you expect and this oven punishes a choked load. Same firm level tamp, slightly lighter hand. Screen out, oven brushed, mouthpiece wiped — house protocol, and on a sealed vapour path with no removable stem it is not optional.

Low Temp (193°C): Vanilla and sweet cream from the first draw and thick with it, which is the first time this session the Plus has felt generous. Sweet raw dough underneath, a cherry edge showing up on the exhale rather than the nose, exactly as the jar advertises. Five draws and it doesn't thin the way Jack's citrus did — dessert notes sit low and heavy and hot walls do them no harm at all.

Mid Temp (204°C): The house PAX result, and the reason people forgive this device. Butter arrives alongside the vanilla, warm dough behind both, black pepper emerging late and pleasantly around the fourth draw. Five draws, dense and even, no hot spots anywhere in them. And here's the limit: what you're handed is warm sweet cream as one satisfying thing. Ask it to separate vanilla from butter and it hands you "sweet". Richer than a glass Arizer would give you, nowhere near as resolved.

High Temp (216°C): Toasted and nutty, caramelised sugar tipping towards a burnt edge, peppery pungency taking over from the dessert. Three draws and it's finished. Nothing gained up here; this stage is for emptying the oven, not for flavour.

The Verdict: Thirteen draws, and a completely different afternoon. This is a dessert-strain machine and it isn't close — the blending that cost Jack its top end costs this flower nothing, because it wants warmth and weight and gets both. Put the two jars side by side at 216°C and they had converged into the same brown roast, which makes the Plus a delivery device with a pleasant window rather than a flavour device. Which is, in the end, the Dyson answer. The object is the product. It dries your hair. It is beautifully made. It is not going to tell you anything about your hair that you didn't already know, and if you bought it expecting that, you bought the wrong thing for the wrong reason and you'll still probably keep it.

Design & Build 8.5/10

I was at a gig in Manchester, queuing for overpriced lager, when a stranger tapped my shoulder.

"Is that a PAX?"

I looked down. The Plus was in my hand, matte grey, barely visible in the dim light. I'd been using it without thinking — a quick draw while waiting, muscle memory from months of practice.

"Yeah," I said.

"Nice. I've got the 3. Love those things."

And then he walked off. No follow-up questions. No "what's that weird device." Just recognition, respect, gone.

That's the PAX energy. It's not just about staying under the radar — it's status. Same energy as seeing someone with a Dyson in their bathroom. You know something about them immediately. There's a melancholy to it now that the Plus has joined the 3 on the discontinued list, mind: two blokes at a gig comparing devices that neither of us can replace.

Anodised aluminium. Clean lines. No buttons, no screens, no visible chamber. It looks like something from a design museum — the kind of object photographers use in lifestyle shoots because it doesn't need explanation. Sarah's first guess was "portable speaker", which tells you everything about the industrial design and nothing at all about the vapour.

The build quality is excellent. Solid aluminium body, satisfying magnetic lid, haptic feedback that actually feels intentional. At 93g — retailer-measured, since PAX don't publish a figure — it weighs less than a pack of cards, and at 98 × 31 × 22mm it's flat rather than chunky. The matte finish resists fingerprints better than the glossy PAX 3. The proportions are perfect for palming — you can close your fist around it and it vanishes completely.

But I've heard the failure stories. Crackling sounds during heat-up. Burnt smells that shouldn't be there. Units that flash on the dock and never wake up. My Plus has been fine for eight months, but I treat it like a nice watch — gentle, clean, never dropped. The people having problems tend to be the ones who expected tank-like durability from something built like a smartphone. It's premium. It's polished. It's not bombproof. Know what you're buying — and know that with the model discontinued, a replacement means a warranty claim rather than a trip to the shop.

Battery & Charging 6.5/10

The battery is fine. The charger is infuriating.

PAX quote "2+ hours" per charge and never publish a capacity. In my testing that works out at roughly 75 minutes of genuine runtime and about 10 short sessions at 6-8 minutes each — the gap between their number and mine is the difference between a device sitting idle at temperature and a device being drawn on. For moderate users who charge nightly, it's adequate. Heavy users will need to charge twice daily — but heavy users probably shouldn't be buying a PAX anyway.

The Spec Check:

Spec	Detail
Battery Type	Sealed lithium-ion, no mAh published
USB-C	No (proprietary magnetic dock)
Pass-through Charging	No
Replaceable Battery	No
Charge Time	~2 hours to full
Real-world Sessions	~10 short sessions / ~75 minutes

The proprietary charger is a genuine problem. I left the dock at a hotel in Birmingham during a work trip. Realised on the train home. The PAX sat in my pocket for three days — beautiful, polished, completely useless — while I waited for my luggage to make its way back.

Three days with a dead vaporiser because I couldn't borrow a USB-C cable.

I've since bought a spare dock for work. That's the PAX tax: you need backups of proprietary nonsense, or you accept occasional paperweight days. The PAX Flow fixes this with USB-C. The PAX 4 fixes this with USB-C. The Crafty+ uses USB-C. The V3 Pro uses USB-C. Everyone uses USB-C except the Plus, and in 2026 that's not charming — it's stubborn. With the model discontinued, buy the spare dock now rather than in two years.

The 10-year limited warranty is generous on paper, and it's one of the few genuinely official PAX figures in this whole review. Whether PAX honours it without making you jump through hoops is a different conversation — the online reports are mixed, and a discontinued model doesn't make that conversation easier.

Ease of Use 8/10

One button. Four modes. Shake to check battery. That's the interface.

Press the mouthpiece to turn on. Wait for haptic buzz. Inhale slowly. Press again to change modes. Long press to turn off. You could figure this out drunk, in the dark, with no instructions. Sarah picked mine up once, pressed the mouthpiece and was drawing on it before I'd finished the sentence explaining how it worked. She owns a PAX Mini 2, so she had a head start. The head start was about four seconds long.

The haptic feedback tells you when it's ready without looking — useful in situations where you can't check the screen. The lip-sensing technology heats when you bring it to your mouth and cools when you set it aside. It's genuinely clever engineering that justifies some of the design premium.

Loading is where technique matters. The Plus is fussy about packing. Fine grind, tamp it down firmly, use the half-pack lid if you're not filling the chamber completely. Loose packs give weak vapour and uneven extraction. Tight packs give consistent sessions. The learning curve is "one session to understand, one week to master." Not steep. Just present.

The Experience Modes are simple but limiting. Four presets, no app customisation, no precise temperature control, and no published degrees to aim at. If you're the type who dials in 187°C because that's where your flower's limonene peaks, the Plus will frustrate you. If you're happy picking from four options labelled by petal count, it's all you need.

Cleaning & Maintenance 7.5/10

The Plus rewards regular maintenance and punishes neglect more sharply than most portables.

The people who love their PAX devices all say the same thing — clean it regularly, pack it properly, and it performs consistently. The people who hate them all say the same thing — "it stopped pulling properly and tastes burnt." The difference is cleaning frequency.

Cleaning Timeline:

• After 3-5 bowls: Quick brush-out, keep things fresh
• After 10 bowls: ISO wipe the oven and vapour path
• After 15-20 bowls: Full deep clean or you'll notice restricted airflow

The Process: Heat the device briefly to soften resin. Brush out the oven with the included tool. ISO-soaked pipe cleaner through the vapour path. Wipe the mouthpiece area. Let everything dry completely. Takes about five minutes.

The 3D oven screens pop out easily — much better than the old PAX 3 screens that seemed designed to fight you. That's a genuine improvement that doesn't get enough credit. Worth buying a spare set while they're still on shelves, for the same reason as the spare dock.

If you're someone who cleans their gear regularly, the Plus is manageable. If you ignore your vape until it stops working, the Plus will punish you with restricted airflow and burnt flavour faster than most devices. It's not the worst cleaning experience — that honour goes to the Crafty+ cooling unit — but it demands more attention than the glass-path simplicity of an Arizer.

Portability 9.5/10

This is where the Plus earns its price tag.

The thing genuinely disappears. Front jeans pocket, back jeans pocket, jacket pocket, palm of your hand — wherever you put it, it's gone. The flat profile sits flush against your body. There's no brick-bulge, no obvious outline, no "what's in your pocket" moments.

Every other portable I own announces itself. The Mighty+ looks like a medical pager from 2009. The Solo 3 v2 is a cylinder the size of a Red Bull can. Even the Crafty+ has that brick energy when you're trying to slip it into slim-fit trousers. The ArGo is the only thing on my shelf that competes, and it does it by folding a glass stem away rather than by being invisible.

The Plus? I smuggled it into Sarah's parents' house at Christmas. Not "smuggled" like anything dodgy — just slipped it into my front pocket with the family vaguely suspicious, and nobody clocked it. In a room full of people, including the in-laws, nobody asked awkward questions about the mysterious device. It reads as "phone or MP3 player" to anyone who isn't specifically looking for a vaporiser.

The mouthpiece is flush-mounted. The LED petals are subtle. The device makes almost no noise. For cinema use, concert use, family gatherings where visibility matters — the Plus is best-in-class.

How I Actually Use This

My Default Setup: Flavour Mode (three petals, around 204°C), fine grind, half-pack lid for solo sessions. I keep a WPA adapter on it approximately never — this isn't a water pipe device, it's a pocket device, and treating it otherwise misses the point entirely.

When I Reach For It: Heading out. That's it. Gigs, cinema, the pub, Sarah's parents' house at Christmas, any situation where having a vaporiser visible would be a problem. The Plus is the "going out" vape. Friday evening, jacket pocket, front door — that's the workflow.

When I Don't: Home sessions. If I'm on the sofa with nowhere to be, I'm reaching for the Mighty+ or the Solo 3 v2 every single time. Better vapour, better flavour, better extraction — at home, the Plus's one advantage doesn't exist.

The Honest Cleaning Reality: I clean it after every 5-6 bowls, which is more often than most devices because I have to. Skip a cleaning and the airflow restriction reminds me within two sessions. I've accepted this as part of the deal.

Session Frequency: Three or four bowls a week, almost exclusively out of the house. It's a role player, not a starter. That's not an insult — it does its specific job better than anything else I own, and now that it's out of production I'm slightly more careful with it than I used to be.

Medical Use Notes

For Pain Management: The Plus works for mild-to-moderate pain sessions when you're away from home. The slow conduction extraction gives a gradual onset — not the immediate relief of a TinyMight 2 on-demand hit, but a steady build over 6-8 minutes. For chronic pain users who need something portable for daytime management without drawing attention, it does the job. For acute pain where you need fast, strong relief, you want something with more extraction power.

For ADHD/Focus: Not my first choice for microdosing. The preset modes lack the precision I want for low-temp focus sessions, and the coolest one — Stealth, somewhere around 182°C by community measurement, since PAX won't tell you — is higher than I'd like for careful daytime dosing. The V3 Pro with its precise degree-by-degree control is better for ADHD management.

Session Timing: First draw to noticeable effect: about 3-4 minutes through the Plus. Full effects build over the session. Duration is strain-dependent but typically 1.5-2 hours from a full bowl on Flavour Mode.

The Medical User's Concern: Reliability. If you depend on a device for pain management, the proprietary charger and the mixed reliability reports are genuine concerns, and discontinuation adds a third: spares get scarcer every year. A backup vape isn't optional — it's medical planning. I keep a V3 Pro charged as insurance.

Value for Money 6.0/10

This is where I have to be properly honest.

The PAX Plus costs £130. For that money, you could have:

• An XMAX V3 Pro (£79.99) — better vapour quality, precise temp control, swappable batteries, USB-C, and £50 cheaper
• A Solo 2 MAX (£128.99) — better vapour quality, better battery life, glass vapour path, effectively the same money
• A Crafty+ (£186.99) — meaningfully better vapour, S&B ecosystem, £57 more
• A PAX Flow (£259.99) — hybrid heating, USB-C, better performance, £129.99 more but a genuine upgrade

On pure performance-per-pound, the Plus loses to all of them. It's not close.

Dave has run the same original Arizer Solo 2 since 2019 and refuses to hear a word about upgrading, so I didn't bother asking him to try this one — I already know the answer, and it involves the word "why". Tom did try it, and his verdict was "It's nice. Wouldn't pay that much for it though." He's right, on vapour quality alone. Tom's also the man whose Crafty+ battery degraded noticeably after eighteen months, so his tolerance for paying premium prices for sealed cells is understandably low.

The successor question: the Plus is discontinued, which changes the arithmetic. If you're buying new and want the same idea with fewer compromises, the PAX 4 is £40 more with denser vapour, faster heat-up and USB-C. If you want maximum performance in a pocket-sized form and can stretch to £259.99, the PAX Flow is £129.99 more and a genuine upgrade — hybrid heating, better airflow, no proprietary dock. Both have a future. The Plus has a shelf.

So who does the Plus make sense for? At £130, while stock lasts, it's genuinely competitive if your primary concern is form factor over performance. It's no longer the overpriced vanity purchase it was at launch. If you need something that fits slim pockets and doesn't look like a vape device, and you're comfortable buying into a device that won't be restocked, the Plus does that specific job well.

It's the Dyson argument. You're not paying for performance. You're paying for the privilege of owning something that looks and feels premium while doing its specific job without announcing itself.

The Verdict (The Bookend)

Eight months in, the PAX Plus still lives in my rotation.

Not for home sessions — that's Mighty+ territory. Not for raw performance — that's Solo 3 v2 or V3 Pro territory. But for the specific moments when stealth matters more than power, when I need something that fits my life without announcing itself, when I'm heading somewhere that demands discretion over everything else — the Plus comes out of the drawer and into the jacket.

It's discontinued now, which I'd be lying if I said didn't sting slightly. PAX have moved on to the PAX 4 and the PAX Flow, and both of them are better vaporisers — the 4 by £40 and a chunk of vapour quality, the Flow by £129.99 and the end of the proprietary dock. If I were buying today with no PAX in the drawer, I'd get one of those two. But at £130.00, while there's stock on the shelf, the Plus is genuinely competitive — no longer the overpriced vanity purchase it was at launch, just a legitimate stealth option for people who need exactly this specific thing and don't mind that nobody's making any more of them.

Sarah uses her Dyson every day. She knows she overpaid. She knows the Boots own-brand would dry her hair just as well. She knows there are objectively better values out there.

But she likes how it feels. She likes how it looks. She likes that it makes her feel like the kind of person who owns a Dyson.

Score Breakdown

Category	Score	One-Line Summary
Vapour Quality	7/10	Adequate conduction — smooth and consistent, never exceptional
Design & Build	8.5/10	Premium aluminium, gorgeous design, haptic feedback, mixed reliability reports
Battery & Charging	6.5/10	Runtime is fine, proprietary dock is a genuine liability
Ease of Use	8/10	Dead simple interface, but packing technique matters more than it should
Cleaning & Maintenance	7.5/10	Rewards regular maintenance, punishes neglect faster than most
Portability	9.5/10	Best-in-class form factor — nothing this capable is this compact
Value for Money	6.0/10	Design tax is real, and a discontinued device has to be cheap to make sense
Overall	7.5/10	The best vaporiser for people who need to not look like they own a vaporiser

The formula lands at 7.3; scored 7.5 on the same logic as the Mini 2 — the disappearing act carries no weight in the maths and is precisely what you're paying for. Two-tenths, credited in the open. A 7.5 still means you're buying the form factor, not the function: the Dyson Supersonic is a 7.5/10 hair dryer that's a 10/10 design object, and this is the same energy.

Vs the Competition

The obvious comparison and, now, the succession plan. The Flow adds hybrid heating, USB-C charging and better airflow — fixing the three biggest complaints about the Plus. If you're buying new and can stretch to £259.99, the Flow is the smarter choice, and it's the one that will still have parts on the shelf in three years. But at £129.99 more, the gap needs to justify itself, and for casual users the Plus still does the core job. The Flow is what you upgrade to, not what you start with.

Full PAX Flow review → | PAX Plus vs PAX Flow →

The value killer. The V3 Pro delivers better vapour quality, precise temperature control, swappable 18650 batteries and USB-C charging — all for £50 less. It's less disguiseable and less pretty, but it's a better vaporiser by every functional measure. If form factor isn't your priority, the V3 Pro is the obvious choice. If form factor is your priority, the Plus justifies its premium.

Full XMAX V3 Pro review → | PAX Plus vs V3 Pro →

Better vapour, worse battery, less portable. The Crafty+ produces meaningfully superior vapour through its hybrid heater, but it's thicker, heavier and less pocketable, and it's £57 dearer. The Crafty+ also has notoriously poor battery life — Tom's degraded noticeably after 18 months. If vapour quality matters most, the Crafty+ wins. If you need a compact device, the Plus wins. Different tools for different jobs.

Full Crafty+ review → | PAX Plus vs Crafty+ →

The other compact option, and effectively the same money — six quid separates them. The ArGo's recessed glass stem makes it properly pocketable, and the glass vapour path delivers cleaner flavour than the Plus's conduction oven. But the ArGo is much slower to heat, has a smaller chamber, and doesn't have the Plus's premium-tech aesthetic. The ArGo achieves this through engineering; the Plus through design. Similar destinations, different routes.

Full ArGo review → | PAX Plus vs ArGo →