Starting A Lash Business Part 3: How to Set Treatment Prices

How to Become A Lash Tech Part 3 | A Guide to Setting Treatment Prices

By now, you’ll know all of our top tips for picking the best lash extensions training course for you, and you’ll also know all about the associated costs with starting your own eyelash extensions business. What you’ll need to know now though, is how to price your treatments, and the best policies to put in place to protect your income. 

Pricing Treatments

How to price lash extensions treatments is one of the questions we get asked the most by beginner lash techs, and while it can vary from technician to technician or from salon to salon, there are a few factors that you should consider when setting your pricing. Bear in mind as well that we’re only discussing classic lash extensions prices here – our volume lash extensions pricing guide will be with you soon, but as this series is for those newer lash techs among you, we’re keeping it as easy to digest as we can. Lastly, like in our previous post, we’re going off of the assumption that you’re working from home as a beginner and you’re not working in a salon just yet. Of course renting a space will add costs, but that is a bridge you can cross when you come to it!

Product Costs

Working out your product costs is pretty simple on the surface, as you just have to divide the total cost of the product by the number of uses that you get out of it. For something like a mascara wand or Protein Remover Pads this is quite easy, as you have a limited number of products in each container but for lash extensions or pretreatment products, this is significantly more difficult. Lucky for you though, we’ve done the leg work for you! Keep in mind that while these ‘uses per container’ are based on real-world salon experience from our team of lash techs, it does depend a little bit on estimation and a little bit on how much product you dispense. As a beginner lash tech, it’s quite likely that you will dispense a little more of each liquid than you might need to, and you may end up going through lashes faster than you will when you get a bit more experienced.

That’s quite a rough guide, we know, but hopefully it will give you at least a little bit of an idea of how much each product costs you, use-for-use. Tape has been omitted here because it’s so dependent on how much you use for each client, and how you’re using it so it’s almost impossible to break down in this way. 

To put it more simply, if you were using each pretreatment product in our recommended routine (that’s the 5-step bundle minus Booster), the most commonly used lashes for a classic lash extensions set, and the most commonly used glue by beginner lash techs, you’re looking at:

Which comes to a total of £4.58. Again, this is approximate, but you can see here that your product cost actually is quite low. So how should you work out how to price your treatments?

Product Costs + Time

So you can see from the tables above that your product costs are actually pretty low, so surely you can get away with charging £15 for a set of classic lashes, right? Well, not really. Not if you want your business to have any kind of longevity. 

While £15 will give you a nice little profit on your £4.60 product costs, also consider that you are putting in your time and effort into learning, practising and perfecting your craft, and you’re also putting in the time to work on each client, giving them a bespoke lash set based on their face and eye shape and desired look. Not to mention that doing lash extensions is quite fiddly and can make your neck and back ache as well. 

The long and short of it is that you need to account for your time as a working professional. Consider that you’re spending perhaps 2 hours on a full set of classic lashes, and think about how much an hour of your time is worth. 

1 hour of your time might = £15, so you’ve got £30 for 2 hours plus your £4.60 product cost (round up to £5 to be on the safe side) and you’ve got £35 for the treatment. To be honest though, that’s pretty cheap for a set of classic lashes wherever it is that you’re offering them, so don’t be afraid to bump that up to £50 at least. 

Product Costs + Time + Experience

£50 for a set of lashes is a very reasonable price, and it gives you a nice little profit too. You might find that you’ll want to offer a lower price for your first few clients just to boost your lash portfolio and get some clients on your books. That’s all perfectly fine and is good practice too, but be sure to increase your prices as you gain experience for the simple reason that you will be highly sought after and well respected as a professional in your field. 

Something else that’s highly likely to happen is that you’ll take more courses or at the very least spend more time practising new mapping styles and techniques, so you should be compensated for your time. 

If you’ve been qualified for 6 months, you have full books and a waiting list, increase your prices. If you take additional courses and have a wall full of certificates, increase your prices. If you offer more maps and styles than the basic lash sets, increase your prices. Seriously.

Product Costs + Time + Experience + Location

Okay, this is the ‘it depends on’ section. The long and short of it is that you’re more likely to charge higher prices if you’re lashing in Central London than you are if you’re in a little village in North Devon. That’s to be expected, but it doesn't mean you should sell yourself short – your time, skills and expertise are well worth paying for, so charge what you are worth!

All things considered, at the very least you should set your prices according to product costs and how much you feel your time is worth at the level you’re at. There’s no single answer to ‘how much should I charge for a set of classic lashes’, and everything we’ve said above will also depend on your clientele – if you’re a uni student lashing other uni students, the likelihood is that you’ll be charging a little bit less for your sets anyway (that being said, if you can gain a social media following and lash some locals who aren’t on a student budget as well, why not have a separate price list?)

Want to know more? Check out the rest of the series! 

Part 1: Picking the Best Course For You | Part 2: Associated Costs with Starting Up | Part 4: Which Policies You Should Introduce and Why | Part 5: How to Get More Bookings | Part 6: Using Social Media for Business Growth | Part 7: Should You Expand Your Treatment List? | Part 8: What Else Can You Do With A Lash Qualification? | Part 9: How to Become A Lash Trainer