In most states, yes. The moment a stylist sells a bottle of shampoo across the chair, she is a retailer in the eyes of her state, and retail sales of tangible goods are taxable in nearly every state that has a sales tax. The service side of the business follows different, state-specific rules, which is where the confusion comes from.
Sales tax on retail product is a state-by-state rule
Sales tax is state law, not federal, so the exact rules depend on where your chair is. The broad pattern: tangible products sold at retail, shampoo, conditioner, styling product, brushes, aftercare kits, are taxable in almost every state with a sales tax, at the state rate plus any local add-ons. A handful of states have no state sales tax at all. The tax is collected from the client at the register, added to the price, and then remitted to the state on a schedule the state assigns, monthly, quarterly, or annually depending on your volume.
Two details trip up booth renters. First, the obligation belongs to whoever makes the sale: if you sell retail from your own booth or suite, it is your permit and your filing, not the salon owner's. Second, product you buy to resell can usually be purchased tax-free from your distributor with a resale certificate, because sales tax is meant to be charged once, to the final customer. Product you consume in services, your backbar, is different: you are the final user of that, so you generally pay tax when you buy it.
Services versus product, why the register treats them differently
Many states do not tax personal services like haircuts and color, so a stylist can have taxable retail sales and untaxed service revenue in the same day. But a meaningful number of states do tax salon or beauty services, and some tax specific services while exempting others. That means one stylist may collect tax only on product while another, one state over, collects on the whole ticket. Bundling matters too: when a service and a take-home product are sold together for one price, states have rules about how much of the bundle is taxable, so pricing them separately on the ticket keeps things clean.
Because the patterns genuinely differ by state, verify your own state's treatment of both services and retail with your state revenue department before setting up your booking app's tax settings. Most modern booking and checkout platforms can apply tax to retail items only, once you tell them the rules.
Getting a seller’s permit before the first retail sale
Selling retail without registering is the avoidable mistake. States require a seller's permit or sales tax license before you make taxable sales, and registration is typically cheap or free. Once registered, file every period the state assigns, even a period with zero retail sales, because unfiled returns generate notices and penalties on their own. Keep sales tax you collect out of your mental income: it is the state's money passing through your hands, and the cleanest habit is letting your point-of-sale report totals and paying directly from those reports. One afternoon of setup, permit, resale certificate, tax settings in your booking app, turns retail from a compliance risk into a clean profit line, and none of this touches your federal Schedule C, where retail income and product costs are reported regardless.