Run the numbers on your colour bar. Not the price of one tube — the price of a year.

A busy Irish salon gets through a lot of colour. If you're paying a Wella or L'Oréal tube price on every one of those, the difference between brands isn't a few euro. It's a line on your P&L that you could be spending on staff, training, or the chair you've been putting off replacing.

Here's the comparison, done properly.

Tube for tube

Retail prices including VAT, checked 21 August 2026.

Now look at the size column again, because this is the bit that gets missed.

Life Color Plus is a 100ml tube. Every one of the big three is 60ml. So you're not comparing €8.90 to £21.99 — you're comparing €8.90 for 100ml to roughly £22 for 60ml. Per millilitre, that's a difference that stops being a discount and starts being a different business model.

But is it the same colour?

Fair question. Here's the specification, from FarmaVita's own 2026 catalogue:

• 148 nuances, including the Mineral Shadows Collection
• 100% white hair coverage
• Excelsa HP technology — oligopeptides from enzymatic hydrolysis of Brazil nut (Bertholletia excelsa) protein, for restructuring during the colour service and better penetration
• 1:1.5 standard mix, or 1:1 for a more intense result

For context, Schwarzkopf publishes 143 shades for IGORA Royal. Wella publishes "100+" for Koleston and L'Oréal doesn't publish a figure at all. Life Color Plus at 148 sits at the top of the shade counts that are actually published — you are not trading range for price.

Suprema Color runs alongside it at 121 nuances in a 60ml tube, built on a Prodigious Oil Complex of three precious oils, also with 100% grey coverage.

One thing we won't tell you

You'll see Life Color Plus described online as low-ammonia. It isn't, and we're not going to say it is.

What FarmaVita actually claims is that the base contains a raw material that absorbs and destroys the ammonia smell. That's an odour benefit — a real one, and your clients will notice it — but it is not an ammonia-content claim, and repeating it as one would be dishonest.

If you want genuinely ammonia-free, FarmaVita has products for that and we'll point you at them instead:

• Omniplex Blossom Glow toners (€12.00) — zero ammonia, zero alcohols, zero direct dyes, vegan formula
• Amethyste Instant Colouring Fluid (€22.75) — free from ammonia, MEA and oxidative pigments, and doesn't lift the natural base at all

That second one is worth a look. A genuine no-ammonia, no-MEA direct colour is rarer than the marketing on most shelves suggests.

The rest of the colour bar

The saving isn't just on tubes. It runs right through the service:

• Life Colour Developer 10 / 20 / 30 / 40 vol, 1 litre — €9.90
• Life Professional Bleaching Powder, dust free — €16.99
• Life Bleaching Powder Violet 500g — €22.49
• Life Professional Tone on Tone 1000ml — €9.90
• Cool Blonde Fluid — kills yellow in 10 seconds — €21.00

The honest version

Wella, L'Oréal and Schwarzkopf are excellent colour houses with deep technical education and decades of trust behind them. Nobody is telling you otherwise, and if your team is trained on one of those systems there's real value in that familiarity.

But you are paying for a global marketing machine, and FarmaVita has spent forty years deliberately not building one. The formulation investment is in the tube. What you save is yours.

Switch one colour line for a quarter and check your figures. That's the whole argument.

Browse the full FarmaVita colour range  |  Permanent colours

Salon owners — apply for a trade account for professional pricing. Colour conversion support and shade-matching available. 051 334244.