The great travel beauty rip-off

I have a stash of travel products, collected and hoarded away for whenever I’m faced with cramming as many under 100ml bottles as possible into one of those clear plastic bags for security. But that tendency to squirrel things away could be saving me a fortune.

It seems that buying special travel-sized toiletries at the airport could be up to 750% more expensive than picking up the standard-sized products – a whopping amount even considering you’re a captive purchaser by this point and that packaging costs are proportionately higher for smaller bottles.

The research by TravelSupermarket looked at the cost of items like shampoo, toothpaste and shower gel in travel-sized bottles to comply with security regulations.

And it found buying at the last minute or picking up miniatures didn’t come cheap. A 500ml bottle of Johnsons Top to Toe Bath for babies, usually £2.67 from Asda, was £1.99 for a tiny 50ml bottle from WH Smith at Manchester airport, a mark-up of 645%. And a 500ml bottle of Listerine, £3 on the high street, was £1.05 for 35ml, while Dove anti-perspirant was £1.99 for 35ml, nearly double the usual £1 for 150ml.

So skip the extortionate price tags and pick up some reusable travel size bottles and decant what you need, or swap aerosols for roll-on deodorant. And check the size as some standard products are actually small enough to fit anyway.

Image: partymonstrrr/Flickr