A 50% surtax landed on US-made nail and make-up products on 8 September. Your invoice will not mention it

Your product bills are going up and nothing on them will say why. Since 8 September, bringing US-made nail products, lip and eye make-up and perfume into Canada costs an extra 50% at the border. Shampoo is not on the list. Perm solution is not on the list. It has nothing to do with whose logo is on the bottle and everything to do with where the bottle was made, which means the answer is printed in small type on the back label. This is the rare cost line you can still do something about this month, because unlike rent and wages you can change a supplier in about a week.

The short answer first

Since 12:01 a.m. on 8 September 2026, a list of US-made goods costs an extra 15%, 25% or 50% to bring into Canada. Finance Canada calls it a surtax. The list covers $27.6 billion of imports.

Five items from the cosmetics chapter of the tariff are on it, and all five sit at the top rate of 50%:

• 3303.00.00 perfumes and toilet waters
• 3304.10.00 lip make-up preparations
• 3304.20.00 eye make-up preparations
• 3304.30.00 manicure or pedicure preparations
• 3305.90.00 preparations for use on the hair, "other"

Now the half of this that nobody is reporting. The hair heading splits four ways, and only that last catch-all is caught. Shampoos (3305.10.00), preparations for permanent waving or straightening (3305.20.00) and hair lacquers (3305.30.00) are not on the list.

Neither are powders (3304.91.00), nor other beauty or skin-care preparations (3304.99.00), which is where most face and body product sits. Soap is not on it. Shaving preparations are not on it.

So this is not a tariff on beauty products. It is a tariff on five things. If you do nails, it landed in the middle of your cabinet. If you do hair, it clipped one corner of it.

It is decided by the back of the bottle

The surtax applies to goods originating in the US, which Finance defines as goods eligible to be marked as a good of the US under the CUSMA marking regulations.

In plain words: the country printed on the packaging decides it. Not the brand's head office, not your rep's business card, not where you placed the order.

Two things follow, and both are the opposite of what people assume.

Buying from a Canadian distributor does not protect you. If the polish was made in California and crossed the border after the 8th, the surtax was paid at that border and it is inside the price you are quoted. You will not see it on a line of its own.

Buying an American brand does not automatically catch you. Plenty of US-headquartered lines are manufactured in Europe, Mexico or Asia. Those are not on this list.

Which turns the whole thing into one question you put to your supplier, in writing: what country is this marked as made in, and what is the tariff item number? Not "are you affected by the tariffs". That question gets you a paragraph. The specific one gets you a number you can check.

The cost you will never see on an invoice

Here is the mechanic that makes this slippery.

The surtax is charged on the value for duty, which is roughly what the importer paid, not what you pay. Your distributor pays it at the border and then prices from there. So the increase that reaches your cabinet is not a clean 50%, and it depends entirely on how your supplier chooses to pass it on.

Work it through on one bottle. Say the importer buys a US-made gel polish for $10 and sells it to you for $20. From 8 September, the border adds $5 to their $10.

• If the distributor holds the same dollar margin, your price becomes $25. Up 25%.
• If the distributor holds the same percentage markup, your price becomes $30. Up 50%.

Same surtax. Two very different invoices. Nothing in either one tells you a tariff happened.

Scale it to a real month. On $1,500 a month of affected product bought through a chain that doubles landed cost, the two versions above cost you between $375 and $750 a month, so somewhere between $4,500 and $9,000 a year. Those are illustrative shapes, not your numbers, and the whole point is that only your supplier can tell you which end you are on. But even the low end is a real dent in an owner's take-home, and it arrives filed under "supplies", which is where cost increases go to hide.

Two doors are open. One of them is not yours

Goods already in transit. The countermeasures do not apply to US goods in transit to Canada on the day they came into force. Anything on a truck or a boat on 8 September is not caught.

Stock that was already here. The surtax is charged at the border, so product that cleared customs before the 8th never paid it. This is the live question for your next order: not "have your prices gone up", but "is this coming out of stock you landed before 8 September?" Some distributors are still selling pre-tariff inventory. Some repriced the entire catalogue on day one and are now earning the surtax on stock they bought without it. Those are different suppliers and it is worth knowing which one you are buying from.

Remission, which is not for you. There is a formal relief route: Canadian-registered companies can ask Finance to remit the surtax, by email, with evidence. Read the test before you get excited. It is meant for cases where goods used as inputs "cannot be sourced domestically, either on a national or regional basis, or reasonably from non-U.S. sources", or for exceptional circumstances with severe adverse impacts on the Canadian economy. Nail polish and mascara have credible European and Asian alternatives, and you are not the importer of record anyway. If a supplier tells you they are "applying for an exemption", treat that as their problem to solve, not a reason to hold your prices.

Nails and hair are two different problems

Nails took the direct hit. Manicure and pedicure preparations are one tariff item and the whole item is at 50%. A nail service is also unusually product-heavy: the product inside a gel set is a genuine share of the ticket in a way the product inside a men's cut simply is not. So a nail bar feels this in gross margin within a month, and a barbershop may never notice it at all.

Hair got the confusing version. Three of the four hair items are clear of the list and the fourth, the "other" bucket, is caught. You cannot tell from the label which bucket a bottle sits in. You can tell from the supplier, and the tariff item number is a fact they either have or can get from their broker in an afternoon.

The retail shelf matters more than owners think. Product you resell is your highest-margin revenue per minute of staff time, and it is the part of the business a buyer likes most, because it is not you standing behind a chair. If a 50% surtax quietly eats that margin because you kept the shelf price friendly, you have not protected the client relationship. You have donated the one non-labour margin you had.

What this looks like in a sale

Nobody buys a salon on its product costs. They buy it on profit, and then they look at the two-year trend of your margin to decide whether that profit is real.

An unrecovered cost increase does something specific in that room. It does not read as "tariffs". It reads as a business whose gross margin drifted down while its prices stood still, which is the exact pattern a buyer prices as weak pricing power.

The arithmetic is unforgiving and simple. Whatever multiple your business trades at, an annual leak is that multiple times the leak. At three times profit, $6,000 a year of cost you never recovered is $18,000 off your price. At five, it is $30,000. You did not lose it at the closing table. You lost it in a supplies invoice you skimmed in October.

The gym owners on the same list at least got a warning, because a treadmill arrives with a price tag you argue about. A case of polish arrives with a delivery note.