Why We Built a Price Index for UK Beauty (And Why It's Long Overdue)

Try this: search "how much should a gel manicure cost in the UK" right now. You'll get a handful of vague blog posts quoting numbers that are several years old, a few salon websites listing their own prices as if that's representative of anywhere else, and not much else. Try it for BIAB, for a full head of balayage, for lash infills — same story every time. For something people spend real, recurring money on, there's surprisingly little actual data out there.

That's the gap we built Roylina to close, starting with the price index.

The problem, from both sides

If you're a client, you're booking somewhat blind. You don't really know if £55 for a BIAB is normal for your area or a bit steep, because there's no reliable reference point — just whatever the one salon you're looking at happens to charge. You either trust it, ask around your friend group, or just book and find out.

If you're a beauty professional, you're often in a similar position when setting your own prices. Plenty of home-based and self-employed techs end up either guessing, copying whatever the salon down the road charges, or going off outdated advice from a course they took years ago. Pricing too low undercuts your own time and product costs. Pricing blind in the other direction risks losing clients who had no idea your rate was reasonable, because they had nothing to compare it to.

Neither side has been well served by the existing booking platforms either. Most of the big names in this space make their money from commission on every booking, which means their incentive is to get you booking through them — not necessarily to give you transparent, comparable pricing data across the market.

So we just started collecting it

The price index is built from real submitted pricing — client experiences and professional submissions — broken down by treatment and by location. It's not scraped from random salon menus or estimated from a handful of cities and extrapolated nationally. It's meant to actually reflect what people are paying, treatment by treatment, region by region.

This is genuinely a long-term project, not a finished product. Coverage is going to be uneven for a while — some treatments and cities will have plenty of data points quickly, others will take longer to fill in. That's just the honest reality of building something from zero rather than buying a dataset. If you've got a price to contribute, it directly makes the index more useful for the next person trying to figure out what's reasonable.

Why this matters beyond just "useful data"

Pricing transparency does something else too: it makes it harder for the market to drift in ways that don't actually serve clients or professionals well. When pricing is opaque, it's easier for booking platforms to extract heavy commissions without anyone noticing the actual cost to the person doing the treatment. When pricing is visible and comparable, professionals can set fair rates with confidence, and clients can book without that slightly uneasy feeling of not knowing if they're being overcharged.

That's really the whole philosophy behind Roylina, not just the price index — a platform that works for the home-based and independent beauty professional as much as for the client, rather than one that treats both sides as something to extract commission from.

What's next

The price index is just the start. Alongside it we're building out a directory of verified professionals, a pricing calculator so you can budget realistic monthly costs (not just one-off treatment prices), a community space for questions and discussion, and a growing library of proper guides in the Learn section — the kind of practical, UK-specific information that's surprisingly hard to find written by someone who isn't just trying to sell you a specific salon's services.

If you've got a price to add, a correction to flag, or just want to see what's there so far, head over to the price index and have a look.