Thanks for stopping by at Beauty Now – the internet’s newest price comparison website, and the only one that is focused entirely on the wonderful world of hair, beauty, cosmetics, skin care, personal grooming and fragrances.

The reason for launching Beauty Now originated from our frustration with the existing options for bargain hunting beauty products on the internet.  Sure there are loads of “comparison” websites, but most of these try to cover the entire market for everything (what we call the Amazon approach) and the net result we feel is that they don’t do a great job of helping people find the cheapest beauty products (there is a big difference between comparing TVs and comparing moisturiser).   Moreover, although they call themselves “price comparison” sites, a lot of the ones we’ve looked at don’t really make it that easy to compare prices of individual beauty products, which kind of defeats the purpose.

Away from the existing price comparison sites, our other motivation was to help people make sense of the marketplace.  Put simply, there are LOADS and LOADs of hair, beauty, fragrance, and cosmetics websites out there.  Some are fabulous and some are less so (although overall the standard is pretty amazingly high – there are a lot of great companies running hair and beauty websites in the UK).  Anyway, all this choice can ironically make choosing which shop to spend your hard earned money at a lot harder than it seems.  Accordingly some people stick to a few tried and tested sites, and miss out on a whole world of choice and value. This is a real shame as there are some wonderful sites that don’t have the market budgets of some of the market leaders, but offer just as professional a service and sometimes list products and brands that are much harder to find.

So with the goals of making a better price comparison site and covering as much of the market as possible in a coherent way, we set out to develop Beauty Now in June of 2008. Fast forward to May 2009, lots of long hours and plenty of hard work (and even a baby being born) later, we are nearly ready to rock and roll.   We’ve taken the step of releasing the site to the public without any fanfare (and without most of the products that we will eventually be listing) to see how it works in practice and to help us iron  out in bugs.   This is called “beta testing” (or so we are reliably informed by our nerdy, but hot in a sort of Jake Gyllenhaal way, web designers).  So if you are reading this, you are hereby appointed one of our beta testers!

Congratulations, but don’t worry the job is not that demanding.  Just have a click around and see what is what.  If you want you can email us your thoughts, leave a comment on this post, tell some of your friends or just check back in a couple of months to see what has changed.  Easy!