Rip-off Republic Alive & Well? With Beauty Products, the Answer is YES!

In case you'd thought the re******n had brought down the prices of good and services across the board, I've got a bit of bad news. While there's no doubt that if you've got a few quid to spend, there is great value out there at the moment in salon services like facials and nails, but lower prices don't seem to have been passed onto beauty products.

While I've been noticing it for a while (particularly when I read press releases with both sterling and euro pricing), I experienced a really huge discrepancy this weekend which hammered the problem home even more.

Almost to the end of my bottle of Diorskin Nude, I decided to wait till I went through the airport en route to London last Thursday to bag another bottle, reasoning that the 20-odd percent off would make it a bit more affordable. Diorskin Nude is €43 downtown, so it's one of the pricier foundation options. At airport shopping, it was €34.50. Better, but still expensive, I reckoned, so I decided to check how much it'd be in Heathrow on the return journey.

Now that - sing hosannas - BAA have graciously deigned to allow us poor peeps who routinely use gates 80+ to actually take advantage of the shopping options in Terminal One as opposed to herding us straight through those horrible metal tunnels, I headed straight to the beauty counters; located Dior and picked up a bottle of the product in 020.

And the price?

Because I used my credit card, I could pay in euro - and the damage was €26.99. That's €16 off Irish prices, and it is, quite frankly, insane and utterly unjustified that we're paying such an incredibly huge amount more than our UK counterparts for the exact same products.

The other brand I've recently noticed who've been hugely guilty of this has been MAC. It's sad, as it's a company very close to a lot of Irish women's hearts, but when you find that Lipglass is £10.28 in the UK and €17 here, and Solar Bits from the new Style Warrior Collection are £14.68, yet we pay €24.50, you really do start to wonder.

Yes, I know about the exchange rate. I understand we have a higher VAT rate; I know the excuses about insurance and rent per square foot. I've heard them all. And there is no way they can account for the hikes between us and the UK.

Have any of you noticed any really glaring beauty product price discrepancies recently? Rate them here!