The ghd Model Files: Every Generation From 2001 to Sculpt — and What Actually Changed

The ghd Model Files: Every Generation From 2001 to Sculpt — and What Actually Changed

By Zoltan, Zoltan Hair, Mayfair

I still have my first ghd.

Not in a display case — in a drawer at the salon, where it has lived through two decades, several salon moves and more heads of hair than I could count. It still heats. It still works. And I’ve owned, tried and thrown away a graveyard of other irons in the same period: budget ones that died in months, mid-range ones whose coating wore through, expensive ones whose cords fractured. Not one of them has come close to that lifespan. Twenty-odd years is not a normal life for an electrical tool used daily in a professional environment, and the fact that a first-generation ghd has managed it tells you almost everything about why this brand took over British hair.

So this post is the one I’ve wanted to write for a while: the complete ghd model history, generation by generation, with an honest read on what genuinely changed each time and what was largely marketing. It’s part five of my straightener series, and like the last three, it’s about the irons themselves — not treatments, not technique. Just the machines.

2001–2006: the original, and the years that built the myth

ghd launched in January 2001 out of Leeds, founded by Martin Penny, Gary Douglas and Robert Powls after they bought the rights to a ceramic straightening iron from an inventor in South Korea. The tool was simple: ceramic plates, a fixed temperature around 185°C, no display, no settings, no cleverness. You plugged it in, it got hot, it stayed hot, and it did to hair what nothing on the British high street could do.

The distribution decision mattered as much as the engineering: ghd sold through salons and let stylists sell it by word of mouth. It worked so violently that within a couple of years salons had bought around £12 million of stock against a forecast of £3–4 million. The first advertising campaign didn’t arrive until 2003. By 2004 they were in North America, and by 2006 the parent company Jemella was sold for £55 million — then again a year later for £160 million.

The irons of this era were known by their generation numbers — the Mk3, the Mk4, and then the IV Styler that carried the brand through the second half of the decade. This is the family my drawer relic belongs to. What they had, and what almost nothing else had, was a heater that actually held its temperature and plates that stayed flat. No display, no sensors doing clever maths — just excellent thermal engineering and honest build quality. Which is, I suspect, exactly why it’s still running: there is very little in it to go wrong.

2011–2013: the V, the Eclipse, and the arrival of “clever”

The V Gold Series arrived in 2011 — the gold-plated aesthetic that became the brand’s signature look, alongside the styling refinements of that generation. Then came the genuinely significant one.

The Eclipse, launched in March 2013, was ghd’s first serious step from “even heat” to “actively managed heat” — built around holding a consistent temperature so that coarse hair could be styled in fewer run-throughs instead of the repeated passes cheaper tools force. That framing matters: for the first time the pitch wasn’t a hotter or shinier iron, it was fewer passes, which as I’ve argued throughout this series is the most underrated damage-reduction feature in the industry.

Financially this was also the brand’s peak-momentum era: Lion Capital bought ghd for around £300 million in February 2013, by which point sales had passed £150 million and over two million irons had gone through 50,000 salons worldwide.

2015–2018: Platinum, then Platinum+

The Platinum styler landed in 2015, bringing predictive heat control into the mainstream range — multiple sensors reading the plates and anticipating the temperature drop as hair passes through, rather than simply reacting after the fact.

The Platinum+ followed in 2018, and it remains, to this day, the iron I’d hand most people if they insisted on owning one. Its ultra-zone system holds a genuinely honest 185°C root to tip, and its build quality has proven itself over years of salon abuse. In 2016, between those two launches, Coty bought ghd for an estimated £420 million; ghd later moved into the Wella family, where it sits today, still headquartered in Leeds.

The Gold — the name has now run through several generations — settled into its role as the sensible mid-range: dual-zone rather than multi-zone sensing, the same fixed 185°C, around £100 less than the flagship. For most home users this is where the value genuinely sits, and I say that as someone who’d rather you didn’t buy one at all.

Somewhere in this stretch the range also broadened in ways that mattered more than the marketing suggested: the wide-plate Max, which cut styling time dramatically on thick, curly and afro hair, and the cordless Unplugged, which traded sustained power for portability.

2023–2025: wet-to-dry, and the Chronos era

Duet Style (2023) was the first real departure from the flat-iron formula — a wet-to-dry tool combining hot air and heated plates, taking hair from damp to styled in one tool. It was followed in 2024 by the Duet Blow Dry brush. Whatever you make of the category, it was ghd acknowledging that a solid plate should never meet wet hair.

Then Chronos (2024), which debuted at the Golden Globes with proper fanfare. Its motion-responsive system adjusts heat around 250 times a second based on how fast you’re moving the iron, and the redesigned curved barrel finally made a ghd genuinely pleasant to curl with. Chronos Max followed in 2025 with 43mm plates — 85% wider than the standard Chronos, with thinner edges so you can still work close to the root — and the Chronos Curve curlers rounded out the family the same year.

Honest assessment of Chronos: if you own a Platinum+, it’s a refinement, not a revolution. If you curl as much as you straighten, it’s the better tool.

2026: Sculpt, and the end of controlling the plate

Which brings us to the brand’s 25th anniversary and the most interesting thing ghd has done since 2001.

Sculpt (£369) is the first ghd that doesn’t primarily control the plates — it measures the temperature of the hair. Four measurement systems feed an onboard processor taking around 2,900 readings a second, detecting when hair is between the plates, how much hair is there, and how fast you’re moving. A machine-learning algorithm trained across hair types then tells a thermal controller to add heat where the style needs it or pull it back to protect the hair. ghd claims styling with no damage to the hair’s natural structure, along with substantially more shine, less frizz and faster styling than its previous tools.

Every iron before this — including my beloved relic — controlled a proxy and hoped the hair got what it needed. This one aims at the actual target. Whether the claims fully survive contact with real heads over years is the question only time answers, but as an engineering idea it’s the first genuinely new one in the category for a long while.

Which one, if you must

Best all-rounder: Platinum+. Best value: Gold. Thick, curly or afro hair: Chronos Max. Curling as much as straightening: Chronos. Travel: Unplugged. Early adopter with £369: Sculpt.

But here’s the thing my twenty-year-old iron actually taught me, and it isn’t about ghd. That tool has survived because it was over-engineered for a job it does simply: heat evenly, hold steady, don’t fail. Every generation since has added intelligence to compensate for something — usually for the fact that most people use these tools too hot, too often, on hair that isn’t prepared. The engineering has become extraordinary. The underlying problem it’s engineering around hasn’t changed at all.

Buy the best iron you can, then use it as rarely as you can get away with. Or let me do it, and your hair will outlive your straightener the way mine has outlived every rival.

Zoltan is a London-based hair texture expert and salon owner with over twenty years of experience behind the chair.