Picture this: you're on Magicpin hunting for biryani deals, and right there in the same app, you spot a Lakme face wash at 15% off and a salon slot nearby for a hair spa this Saturday. No new app download. No separate account. Just tap, pay via UPI, done. That's what ONDC for beauty and personal care looks like in 2026, and it's been quietly expanding for over a year now without nearly enough attention from most people.
If you've already heard about ONDC, you know the basic idea. It's a government-backed open network that lets buyers and sellers connect across different apps, the way email lets you message someone from Gmail to a Yahoo account without anyone being on the "same" platform. We've covered how ONDC works in general and how it applies to food delivery, travel, and healthcare. Beauty and personal care is one of the newer categories, and honestly one of the more interesting ones to watch.
What ONDC for beauty and personal care actually covers
The short answer: a lot more than just lipsticks and shampoos.
On the products side, you'll find skincare, haircare, makeup, fragrances, personal hygiene products, and wellness items from both national brands and smaller D2C sellers. On the services side, you can book salon appointments, spa treatments, nail art, threading, and beauty consultations, all through ONDC-enabled buyer apps. You don't go to one specific ONDC app for beauty. You go to any app that's connected to the network.
The services part is what makes this genuinely different from just another e-commerce play. India's salon industry is large. I couldn't find an authoritative official figure, but analyst reports I've come across put the organized and unorganized salon market somewhere in the Rs 80,000 to 1,00,000 crore range. The vast majority of those bookings still happen over the phone or by walking in. Getting local salons onto a digital booking system, without forcing them to pay 20-25% commission to a walled-garden platform, is a big deal for small business owners. (And those commissions are genuinely high, if you ask me.)
How to buy cosmetics on ONDC in 2026
You'll need a buyer app that's connected to the ONDC network. In 2026, the main ones are Magicpin, Paytm, and a handful of regional and telecom-backed super apps. Some state-backed apps are also adding ONDC beauty sections. Once you're in a supported app, look for a "Beauty" or "Personal Care" section, and the flow is pretty much like any other e-commerce experience from there.
Browse, filter by brand or price, add to cart, pay via UPI. Your order might be fulfilled by a seller sitting on a completely different platform, but the network handles all of that behind the scenes. You don't see any of that complexity. It just works.
A few things worth knowing before you order:
- Returns and refunds follow the individual seller's policy, not the buyer app's policy. Check before ordering, especially for skincare where reactions can happen.
- Delivery times vary more than on Nykaa or Amazon, because the seller might be a small D2C brand or local distributor with a smaller logistics setup.
- Prices can be genuinely competitive. Smaller sellers don't have to factor in large platform fees, so you'll sometimes find better deals than on major platforms.
Honestly, the product discovery experience is still catching up with dedicated beauty platforms. Nykaa has years of investment in curated content, reviews, shade finders, and editorial. ONDC's strength isn't the browsing experience right now. It's the fact that smaller Indian beauty brands, the ones who can't afford Nykaa's listing terms, now have a real distribution channel. That's not nothing.
Booking salon services through ONDC
This is where things get genuinely useful. Salons register as service providers on the ONDC network through a seller app, similar to how a restaurant joins Swiggy, except the seller app here is a neutral third party that doesn't take a large cut. When you search for salon services near you in a buyer app, you're drawing from this network.
What separates this from an Urban Company or a Vanityhaat booking is that the salon isn't paying a 15-25% cut to any single platform. They control their own pricing and availability, and they can be discovered on any ONDC buyer app simultaneously.
In practice, for cities like Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi NCR, and Pune, the selection is decent in 2026. For Tier 2 cities like Indore, Coimbatore, or Ludhiana, it's still thin but growing. Smaller towns are where ONDC's promise is biggest, though they'll take a few more years to properly fill out.
What services can you typically book?
- Haircut, colouring, smoothening, and keratin treatments
- Facials, clean-ups, and basic skin treatments
- Waxing, threading, and eyebrow shaping
- Nail art and manicure/pedicure packages
- Bridal and pre-wedding packages from registered parlours
- Home visit services from some registered providers
For bridal packages especially, being able to compare multiple salons' offerings in one place with transparent pricing is a real improvement on the usual approach of calling five places and negotiating over the phone.
Which apps actually work for this in 2026?
This trips people up constantly. ONDC is not an app. It's the underlying network. You access it through buyer apps built on top of it.
For beauty and personal care specifically, Magicpin has been one of the more active platforms given its focus on local commerce and discovery. Paytm's app has an ONDC section too. The Department of Posts has also started offering ONDC logistics support, which helps with last-mile delivery for beauty products in areas where private couriers don't reach reliably. That's a small but meaningful step for Tier 2 and Tier 3 availability. (Annoying that it's still patchy in many places, but at least it's moving.)
Digihaat, which focuses on bringing small businesses onto ONDC, is actively working to get local beauty and personal care sellers onto the network. More platforms like it will come as the category grows. For a current list of buyer apps that support the beauty category, check our ONDC buyer app comparison guide.
Is ONDC better than Nykaa or Amazon for beauty shopping?
For most urban shoppers with an established Nykaa habit, the honest answer is: not yet, not for general shopping. The browsing experience, review ecosystem, and return policies on those platforms are still ahead. If you know what product you want, Nykaa's search and filters are better today.
But there are real scenarios where ONDC makes more sense:
- You want to support a local brand or small seller that isn't on major platforms
- You want to book a salon without Urban Company's pricing or service area restrictions
- You're in a Tier 2 or Tier 3 city where ONDC-enabled local sellers might carry better stock of regional or Ayurvedic beauty brands
- You want competitive pricing because sellers aren't paying large platform commissions
Nykaa posted healthy Q1 2026 results (shares rose about 5% on the announcement), so their core business is clearly doing fine. ONDC isn't an immediate disruption to Nykaa. It's more of a slow structural shift in how smaller and regional beauty retail works in India.
How Indian beauty brands are responding to ONDC
Some D2C beauty brands that previously sold only through Instagram or their own websites have started listing on ONDC to get discovery across buyer apps without paying per-platform fees. Good for them, and good for you as a consumer, because you might discover a well-reviewed Ayurvedic skincare brand from Coimbatore or a handmade soap seller from Mysuru that you'd never have found on a curated marketplace. I think that's genuinely one of the more exciting things ONDC does for beauty specifically.
Digihaat's model, targeting small business inclusion on ONDC, is one platform to watch. As Indian Retailer has reported, platforms like Digihaat are building seller-side infrastructure to bring more local commerce onto the network, including beauty and personal care. The broader PIB and government push around ONDC as a tool for democratising digital commerce applies squarely here. Beauty and salons are one of the most fragmented, local-first industries in India, which makes it a strong fit for what ONDC is actually trying to do.
Hindustan Foods Limited recently acquired a beauty care manufacturing business for Rs 19.90 crore, signalling that the manufacturing side of the Indian beauty industry is consolidating too. More supply, more sellers, more options eventually flowing through networks like ONDC.
Practical tips before you try it
Read the seller's return and cancellation policy carefully. Salon bookings often have a 24-48 hour cancellation window. For products, confirm whether the seller accepts returns and what the timeline looks like.
Pay via UPI always. It's the fastest way to resolve payment disputes, and your transaction is on record. Avoid COD for beauty products from sellers you're trying for the first time.
If something goes wrong, your first contact is the buyer app's grievance mechanism. ONDC mandates that all network participants maintain a grievance redressal process. If that doesn't resolve things, you can escalate through the consumer portal or approach the Consumer Forum. For guidance on your rights when shopping on open networks, see our digital consumer rights guide.
The beauty and personal care space on ONDC is still building. But the logic is sound: no platform lock-in, lower seller commissions, and open access for local salons and small brands that were invisible on the big platforms. Worth a try next time you need to reorder your moisturiser or book a Sunday facial. You might find something better, and cheaper, than you expected.
For a broader look at how India's open commerce network is reshaping different sectors, our ONDC explainer series covers everything from food delivery and healthcare to financial services and agriculture.
