Latin America’s leading e-Commerce platform Linio.com has released the 2017 Beauty Price Index, comparing the cost of several in-demand beauty products and services across 50 countries. The list was ranked by the sum of three categories – Beauty Services, Cosmetic Procedures and Products – with the top-scoring country representing where products and services are most affordable overall. Linio undertook the research to better understand global economic trends in the multi-billion beauty industry.

Clustered at the top of the Index were several Asian and Latin American countries, with Vietnam as the overall most affordable country for beauty products and services. At the other end of the scale were regions with high costs of living, including Northern Europe, Australia, and the USA. Venezuela was found as the most expensive country overall, due to the country’s inflation crisis and the conversion from the Venezuelan bolívar to the US dollar. Ironically, around 10 years ago, Caracas, contained the highest number of beauty parlours per capita in the world.

“At Linio, we place a high value on transparency with our customers, and we hope that our index helps people more confidently interpret variations in costs associated with beauty around the world,” Andreas Mjelde Linio’s CEO said. “Increasingly, the average citizen is a global one, and with a better understanding of global markets comes empowerment to travel, shop, and live smarter.”

The results reveal that Venezuela (along with Egypt and Bolivia among Latin American countries) frequently occurred as the most expensive country by a substantial amount for all services, the USA has an overall ranking of 43: