Cutting the cost of looking good

BEAUTY BARGAINS:THERE'S NOTHING quite like a trip to a city centre hair salon, a chic beauty clinic or the cosmetic counters of certain high-end department stores to bring on that sinking feeling of being very politely fleeced.

Over the past decade, the Irish beauty industry got used to naming its price, but fortunately consumers are finally beginning to baulk at bad value and embrace discounts, deals and DIY instead.

Quite often, “beauty” treatments are more chore than luxury. Like a trip to the dentist, they are viewed by many women as a necessary, potentially painful part of their maintenance routine. But unlike dentists and other service providers, when it comes to purveyors of beauty, their uncompetitive prices have gone largely under the radar, presumably because this issue really only affects one half of the adult population. “It’s a huge industry and women are being ripped off all the time,” says Aisling McDermott of beauty blog beaut.ie.

However after years of lining the pockets of professionals, women are now taking their beauty routines back into their own hands, and exploiting the advances in home treatments. For instance, instead of dashing to a stylist every time their roots need a touch-up, more and more people are overcoming their reservations about home hair dyes and doing their own colouring.

“Sales of box colours have gone through the roof,” McDermott says. “It’s a huge area, everybody is buying.”

The case for DIY-dying is even more compelling for those who have a love-hate relationship with highlights – they love the subtle, natural effect, but hate the eye-watering maintenance cost. Unless you’re deliberately aiming for the growing-out roots look, currently being sported by some celebrities, highlights generally have to be touched-up every eight to 12 weeks, costing between €100 and €180 a pop depending on the salon, and whether you opt for a half-head or a full-head of highlights.

Assuming an average urban price of €130 for half-head highlights, six times a year, the total annual cost will be €780.

Now let’s compare this to the DIY alternative. It’s true that in the past, highlights were best left to the professionals.

Home highlight kits tended to produce a regrettably stripy effect, and often necessitated trips to tut-tutting hairdressers who had to be handsomely paid to undo the damage. However, a whole range of products have now been developed that enable you to achieve achieve salon-worthy blonde highlights at home, such as Clairol Born Blonde Highlights. This particular kit costs £6.15 (€7.14) on chemistdirect.co.uk so, assuming six kits are needed a year to keep roots at bay, this would cost a grand total of €42.84 a year, delivering an annual saving of around €737.

For those who remain sceptical of DIY and just can’t kick that salon habit, it’s still possible to save serious money by pouncing on special offers. For example, boardsdeals.ie recently offered a deal that sent beauty discussion forums into a tizzy: a full head of meche highlights, wash, cut and blow-dry for a reasonable €70 in House of Colour, reduced from a guilt-inducing €165.

Last week, Ireland’s hottest new coupon site citydeal.ie offered a cut, style and deep-conditioning treatment with Total Hair Care in Rathfarnham, Dublin for €26 instead of €80.50. Not surprisingly, over 1,100 people snapped up this deal.

Competition is beginning to drive down prices in the beauty salon market too. As part of its January sale, the Therapie chain is offering laser hair removal sessions for €29. However this offer is only available for specific areas such as hands and feet. Laser treatment for other parts of the body could cost more but Therapie still offers some of the lowest prices on the market.

McDermott believes that beauty salons in Ireland are still making a profit even after slashing their prices because they were previously operating at such high margins.

Earlier this month, Tesco confirmed plans to launch a chain of salons in the UK offering beauty treatments. McDermott says she would love to see the supermarket chain extend this service into Ireland, because it would put pressure on existing Irish salons to offer better value.

However her real bugbear relates to overcharging in the make-up market.

Beaut.ie is regularly sent press releases on new products being launched by cosmetics companies. These releases reveal that “absolutely massive” mark-ups are applied to prices for the Irish market. Because of this price disparity, Irish women are increasingly taking to the web to access cheaper cosmetics but even this route can have its difficulties.

Discount sites such as strawberrynet.com have become hits, but McDermott says beaut.ie has ended its affiliation with this site because it no longer allows Irish users to order items priced in dollars. It will now only accept payment in euro for orders shipped to Ireland, which has the effect of reducing the price transparency. The euro prices quoted to Irish customers now include a VAT prepayment now, which of course makes them less tempting.

Whatever site you use, it’s important to be aware of the VAT implications. When an item is ordered online from outside the EU, that costs more than €22, you will have to pay VAT, which will be collected by the company.

As well as scouring the net for cut-price cosmetics, Irish women have also jumped on board the make-up swapping phenomenon. McDermott realised that many beaut.ie readers were already swapping unwanted (and barely-used) cosmetic products with like-minded women in the US through makeupalley.com. So together with Kirstie, her sister and business partner, she set up the Beauty Swap Siopa on beaut.ie. It has proved hugely popular. In the year-and-a-half since it started, thousands of items have been exchanged.

There are plenty of rules (“no manky mascara or samples”) to ensure that the quality is high. The process relies on trust: once two members have agreed on an exchange, they post their items to each other, and no money changes hands.

“To find their perfect foundation most women will go through about six at least, so they’re left with all the bottles that are full. They’ve only tried them a couple of times and they cost [about] €40 each,” she explains.

“Someone else will love that foundation, so swap it and get something decent that you’d like.”

Be prepared for fierce competition, though. High-end brands like Benefit and Mac are in demand and these ladies mean business.

“These girls are really hardcore. They’re make-up junkies,” she says. “They call it the grail quest. When they find something perfect, that’s their ‘HG’ product – the Holy Grail product.”

The Irish beauty industry got used to naming its price but fortunately consumers are finally beginning to baulk at bad value