Personal Care Items and Pharmacy Medicines

Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon seems to have the best shopping for western products.

I searched in Hanoi and Danang for certain U.S branded personal care items. No success there.

Then I walked into the world famous Bến Thành Market in HCMC/Saigon, and in five minutes I found the electric toothbrush heads, men's deodorant and shaving gel I'd been seeking elsewhere for the previous 8 months.

(NOTE: There are a lot of bad reasons not to go into the Bến Thành Market, so please proceed with caution and a willingness to haggle, with unmarked prices sometimes 400% higher than charged a few blocks away from that tourist trap.)

You will be able to find most personal care items in a Lottemart, MM MegaMarket, Big C or Co-Op Store, though some items may only be available as Vietnamese or Asian brands.

Also, a few standard items (such as feminine hygiene products) are carried in the convenience store chains Circle K and Vinmart.

Get a Vinmart card and have it scanned every time you shop to get money credits that build up surprisingly quickly.

Same at Lottemart.

Eventually you will identify local personal care product stores (usually nearby a neighborhood market) where you can get Vietnamese brand name items for about half of what you pay in the four big chain stores I mentioned.

For pharmacy items, there is a chain in HCMC (perhaps also in other cities) called Pharmacity. Quality Vietnamese generic brands are readily available there. You can definitely trust the brand name STADA.

U.S. import items may require more searching around the city, as those items are usually brought into the country by the tourist supply chain: Vietnamese citizens returning from trips abroad.

Good news: delivery of almost anything legal is easily available in Vietnam. One of the best sources of western products here is a website similar to Ebay called Lazada
(there is an English language app available)

I hope others will add suggestions or corrections in this thread.