What 11,929 products on UK shelves reveal about skincare pricing

£28.50 is the median price of the 3,040 moisturisers in our snapshot: half the category costs less, half costs more, and the top tenth starts at £73.80.

The spread only becomes visible per millilitre. Among the 2,290 moisturisers with a single parseable size, the cheapest tenth sits at £10 per 100ml or less, while the priciest tenth starts at £180 per 100ml. That is an 18× gap inside a single product category.

The top of the category is 111SKIN’s Black Diamond Cream at £650 for 50ml, listed at LookFantastic, which works out at £1,300 per 100ml. That is the retail price as listed on the snapshot date.

£213.33 per 100ml. Eye care has the highest per-millilitre median of any category we track, roughly 3.7× the moisturiser median of £57.98 per 100ml.

Even the affordable end is dear: the cheapest tenth of the category tops out at £88 per 100ml, which is more than the median moisturiser costs per millilitre. Small pack sizes do much of the work here. The priciest listing in the category, Noble Panacea’s The Absolute Restoring Eye Cream, is a 9ml pot at £244, which works out at £2,711 per 100ml.

£12 per 100ml is the median for wash-off cleansers, the cheapest category in the database, and toners sit level at £12. The floor is lower still: a tenth of cleansers cost £4 per 100ml or less, and a tenth of toners £6 or less.

These are also the calmest corners of the market. The gap between the cheapest and priciest tenth is 8.6× for cleansers and just 4.3× for toners, the narrowest spread we measured, against 18× for moisturisers. In the one sense shelf data can answer this question, the answer is the wash basin: the middle of the market charges £12 per 100ml for the steps you rinse straight off, versus £116.67 per 100ml for serums that stay on the skin.

£35 a bottle at the median, the highest median price of the seven categories we track, across 1,660 serums. A tenth of serums cost £109 or more.

Per millilitre, the numbers climb quickly: the median is £116.67 per 100ml, and the top tenth starts at £400 per 100ml. The steepest listing among serums is Noble Panacea’s The Absolute Intense Renewal Serum at £410 for 15ml, listed at LookFantastic, which works out at £2,733 per 100ml.

19.9% of the 11,929 products in the snapshot are priced above £50, roughly one in five, and 6.4% sit above £100. Premium is not a corner of this market; it is a fifth of it.

The budget end is bigger still: 24.8% of products cost £15 or under. The overall median product price is £27, and the single most expensive listing in the snapshot is £2,160.

£75.25 up front. Take the three steps most routines are built on, cleanser, moisturiser and SPF, and buy the median-priced product in each category: £19.50 + £28.50 + £27.25 comes to £75.25.

To be explicit about the method: this is the sum of the three category medians, a shopper buying the exact middle of the market at each step. It is not the median of real shopping baskets, and it is not a recommendation of what to spend. Buy from the cheaper half of each category and the figure falls fast; roughly a quarter of all products cost £15 or under.

18× is a price gap, not a quality measure — and it is worth being precise about what this page can and cannot tell you. Everything above measures dispersion in listed prices: what UK retailers charge for products in the same category. None of it measures how well any product works. A £180-per-100ml moisturiser and a £10-per-100ml one sit on the same shelf, and nothing in this dataset says which will serve your skin better.

Whether price tracks performance is a separate question, and it needs evidence about ingredients, concentrations and formulation rather than price tags. We have written that up on its own page: what’s worth paying for in skincare.

The full table. Product counts and median prices describe every product we classified into the category; the per-100ml columns are computed only on products with a single parseable size between 5ml and 1,000ml.

The figures on this page come from a snapshot, taken on 17 March 2026, of the Boots and LookFantastic product feeds held in our own database: 11,929 skincare products across 607 brands, of which 97.3% were listed as in stock on the snapshot date. It is the same database every consultation draws its recommendations from; how it does that is described on our methodology page.

Price-per-100ml figures are computed only for single products with a parseable ml size between 5ml and 1,000ml, so multipacks and ambiguous listings cannot distort the per-millilitre columns. Sets, kits and bundles are excluded, as are products whose names indicate body, hair or hand care. We use medians and percentiles rather than averages throughout, because a single £2,160 listing would drag any mean upwards while barely moving the median.

We refresh the database periodically. This analysis describes the 17 March 2026 snapshot; when we re-run it, we will update this page and the dates shown above.