Colour profitability in the salon: what a tube really costs

Colour is the service that keeps a salon running. It’s also the one that’s talked about least clearly, because it blends three things that are rarely added up together: the product’s purchase price, the time spent, and the selling price displayed at the chair.

A market under pressure

In France, the Union nationale des entreprises de coiffure (UNEC) recorded a 3.1% drop in women’s salon visits in 2023 compared with 2022. Fewer visits doesn’t just mean less turnover: it also means a fixed burden — rent, wages, energy — spread across fewer transactions.

At the same time, colour remains the foundation of the business. Nearly seven in ten clients who walk through a salon’s door have their hair coloured. It’s the service that brings them back every four to six weeks, the one that structures the diary, and the one that determines annual margin.

The real cost of a colour service

Take a standard root colour. The material cost adds up the tube, the developer, the protective product, and possibly a finishing treatment. The time cost adds up application, processing and rinsing — only part of which actually occupies the professional.

Most salons know their selling price and estimate their time. Far fewer can say, down to the cent, what an applied tube actually costs them. Yet that is precisely where the difference lies between two neighbouring salons charging the same price.

A one-euro difference in a tube’s purchase price, across four hundred colour services a year, comes to four hundred euros of margin. Across fifteen hundred, that becomes a month’s worth of overheads.

Lower the purchase price, or raise the selling price?

Both levers exist, and they aren’t mutually exclusive — but they don’t suit the same salon.

Raising the selling price means selling more than a service: a diagnosis, an expertise, an experience. It requires a product brand that backs up that narrative, a trained team, and a clientele ready to pay the difference. That’s the logic of a premium colour.

Lowering the purchase price doesn’t mean buying worse. It means buying differently: directly, online, with no sales force to fund, no paper catalogue, no middleman’s margin. That’s the logic of an affordable colour, and it protects profitability without touching the price on display in the window.

These two logics often coexist in the same town, sometimes in the same salon, depending on the service. That is precisely why a single brand cannot honestly serve both.

Three common mistakes

Counting the product without counting the mistake. A redone colour uses the product twice, the time twice, and often the client’s trust as well. A well-controlled protocol costs less than a commercial discount.

Negotiating an introductory price without looking ahead. An attractive entry price followed by a silent increase costs more than it earns. The right benchmark is the average price over twelve months, not the price of the first order.

Forgetting about stock. Too much stock ties up cash and goes out of date. A tight catalogue, restocked quickly, is worth more than a wall of shades used twice a year.

What we take from this

Colour is not a cost line: it’s the salon’s economic engine. The question, then, is not paying the lowest possible price for the product, but knowing exactly what it costs, what it earns, and which clientele it suits. Everything else — the brand, the narrative, the discount — comes after.