Salford revealed as UK’s beauty capital with more hair and nail salons than anywhere else

It’s fair to say most of us missed our hairdressers during lockdown. And as salons are starting to reopen, people are flocking back to have colours done, brows tidied and tans topped up.

But some cities are keener than others to keep up their beauty regimes, of course.

To see which cities are the ‘most beautiful’, Nicely Polished looked at some of the biggest cities across the UK to find out which have the largest number of salons and studios.

And Salford came out top, with the largest number of hair salons, hair removal salons and nail salons per square mile in the country.

Salford has an impressive 20.99 hair salons per square mile, with Oldham coming second across the UK with 14.64.

Oldham is the only other city in Greater Manchester to make the top ten, which also includes Blackburn, Burnley, Watford, Blackpool, St Albans, Portsmouth, Bournemouth and Birkenhead.

Salford has 4.44 hair removals salons per square mile, versus 2.53 in Watford, the second highest in the UK. There are also 4.07 nail salons per square mile in Salford.

There are also 3.09 tanning salons per square mile in Salford, which is the second highest in the UK as it’s beaten by Blackburn’s 6.63.

In total, Salford has a whopping 32.59 beauty salons per square mile – that’s 264 in total –  followed by 23.49 per square mile in Blackburn (39 in total) and 18.26 per square mile in Oldham (126 in total).

Manchester comes 26th on the list overall, with 8.18 beauty venues per square mile (365 in total) while Bolton and Bury come 28th and 29th respectively.

Rochdale comes in at number 50.

Nicely Polished used Yelp to find the number of hairdressers and hair stylists, hair removal salons, nail salons, and tanning salons within each city, and then divided that number by the area of each city or borough in square miles to find the number of beauty locations per square mile.