UK’s most Googled at home beauty how-tos revealed

A recent study by Currys analysed the Google search volume for “how to… at home” for a range of beauty treatments to discover which are the most popular to try and which have grown in popularity over the past 12 months.

When it came to the one treatment everyone is itching to learn, “Gel Nails” came out on top with 176,640 yearly searches for “how to do gel nails at home” and similar relevant searches. The price of getting gel nails done professional can cost between £30-£40 but upwards of £50 if extensions are included, and with a lifespan of three weeks minimum, you could be looking at over £600 for the year.

The second most searched DIY beauty ‘how to… at home’ was fake tan, which receives, on average, 101,280 yearly searches on Google in the UK. Professional spray tans range from £25-£35 on average, and most will have faded by the time the week is up. Serial tanners looking for that year-round glow could be forking out around £1820 a year if they committed to once a week.

And the third was acrylic nails, which came in at under half of its gel alternative with 85,320 yearly UK searches for how to do these nails at home.

When it came to the DIY beauty treatments rising in popularity the most, it was dermaplaning which came out on top, this relatively new beauty treatment which involves shaving the face to exfoliate and get rid of peach fuzz has had a 20% growth in searches year on year.

And while gel nails have risen in popularity by 9% year on year, the same cannot be said for acrylic, searches for which have decreased by 51%.

It seems that despite the cost-of-living crisis many people are abandoning the idea of doing it at home as seven out of nine beauty treatments analysed for DIY at home search volume have seen a decrease in 2023 compared to 2022.

Top of the Toks: DIY beauty on TikTok

Of course, not everyone uses Google for their research now, when looking at the same list of treatments on TikToks the most watched was #faketanroutine with 544M views, the videos using this tag give tips to those wanting to perfect their own fake tan at home.

The next TikTok DIY beauty hashtag with the most views was the lockdown special #diyhaircut which currently has 452.2M views. Despite the hairdressers being very much open, many still choose to cut their own hair on the app, with varying levels of success.