The Ganni loafers you’ve bookmarked for the Boxing Day sales, that mattress you nabbed on Black Friday; few purchases deliver a dopamine hit as potent as the ones you get for less. But beauty buyers needn’t wait for sale season to bag a bargain.
Welcome to dupe culture, where products from high-end brands are replicated by competitors for a fraction of the price. Short for duplicate, dupes’ budget-friendly powers have seen them ascend faster than a Strictly contestant doing the quickstep. The hashtag #beautydupe has 93m views on TikTok and according to research by Mintel, 74% of make-up users agree that affordable products work just as well as premium ones. Meanwhile, over on Dupeshop – an online beauty platform that pits beauty dupes against their pricier counterparts –traffic has increased by 107% year-on-year.
And yet, as more and more dupes emerge, so do the number of questions about their legitimacy. For some, dupe culture is a by-product of the cost-of-living crisis and a way of ensuring beauty remains accessible to all. For others, dupes are fuelling everything from rampant consumerism to creative property theft. As dupe culture prepares for its busiest month of the year, should you be buying?
Fake expectations
While dupes have only recently entered the beauty sphere, they’ve long been a thorn in fashion’s side. Back in the early 00s, designer behemoths such as Chanel, Prada and Burberry saw versions of their catwalk collections on the high street within weeks of their shows. But while these knock-offs were ubiquitous, they were unlikely to win you street cred – and perhaps as a result of classism, dupes (or fakes, as we’d call them then) made you stick out like a sore thumb to those in the know.
Two decades on, dupes have had a reputational rebrand to rival the Birkenstock. In a study by the European Union Intellectual Property Office last year, half of 15- to 24-year-olds said they didn’t care if a product was fake if the price of the genuine product was too high. So what changed? Social media, for one. ‘It increased the speed of trend cycles and made everyone want to jump on trends as quickly – and as cost-efficiently – as possible,’ says Millie Kendall MBE, founder of the British Beauty Council. Before long, online retailers such as Shein and Asos were producing dupes while the originals were still popular on IG and TikTok. This gave consumers the ability to get ahead of trends, for less. It was only a matter time before dupe culture infiltrated beauty, too.
Beauty dupes began life on YouTube, where beauty vloggers focused first on make-up. Back in 2010, the term ‘dupe’ was reserved for products that closely resembled a cult-favourite that had either been on sale as a limited edition or long discontinued. But beauty insiders like to talk; before long, the industry secret that high street brands had their make-up made in the same factories as designer products –meaning colours and formulations were probably identical – became public knowledge. As communities on YouTube, IG and TikTok grew, so did the intel on make-up, skincare and fragrance dupes. Now, the IG account @dupethat has 1.2 million followers; and Dupeshop has amassed more than 1 million users.
Super dupers
What constitutes a beauty dupe depends on the overall impression of the product; the term ‘beauty dupe’ was born on the internet and there’s no legal definition. ‘First, you have products that are out-and-out fakes (also known as counterfeits),’ says Anousha Davies, trademark attorney in the intellectual property team at the law firm Birketts. ‘Then you have close relatives of out-and-out fakes but, crucially, they’re within the legal boundaries.’
For brands attempting to dupe, she explains, operating within the legal boundaries involves walking a tightrope between imitating a product enough to remind consumers of the original while ensuring there are sufficient differences to avoid infringing a brand’s intellectual property rights (such as its trademarks or copyright). ‘These dupes are significantly cheaper than the originals, while being close enough in appearance or performance to make the cheaper option seem like a good deal,’ adds Davies.
Stores such as Aldi, Lidl and Primark are private label retailers, meaning they sell third-party products under their own name –and they’ve heavily innovated in beauty dupes. Aldi’s Lacura Caviar line was compared with La Prairie’s Skin Caviar Collection, while its Lacura Healthy Glow has been compared with Pixi Glow Tonic. Meanwhile, its Lacura Vitabase is a dead ringer for Bobbi Brown’s Vitamin Enriched Face Base and its make-up range includes dupes of Nars’ iconic creamy concealer and ‘orgasm’ blush. The brand even offers dupe fragrances for Acqua Di Parma Colonia and Jo Malone.
But there’s another type of dupe, too; products that aren’t copycats, but affordable alternatives with similarities from skincare benefits to shade ranges. ‘They might have completely different packaging or different components to the [original] product, but we’ve found during testing that they’re comparable enough to be labelled a dupe,’ says Amir Awan, co-founder of Dupeshop. Launched in 2021, the e-tailer features hundreds of reviewed products that have been tested by an in-house team of cosmetic scientists, skincare experts and pro make-up artists; products are judged on their formula, texture, shade and performance, and each lower-cost dupe is offered as a match for the high-end equivalent.It wields considerable power: Dupeshop’s TikTok video comparing Garnier’s Face FluidSPF50+, £12, to La Roche Posay’s Invisible Fluid SPF50+, £19.90, has 5.1m views, while a TikTok comparing Maybelline’s wallet-friendly Lifter Gloss with Fenty Beauty’s Gloss Bomb caused the former to sell out nationwide.
Added value
With stellar reviews going viral, dupes seem like a win-win for consumers savvy enough to research where they can afford to save – and where it’s actually worth splurging. But do dupes always live up to the hype? ‘I question whether dupes can deliver the same results as scientifically proven skincare,’ says Daniel Isaacs, director of research at skincare brand Medik8. ‘Ultimately, skincare products aren’t created equal and a brand’s product prices cover not just the cost of the main active ingredient – say, retinol – but the research and development costs of the technology that ensures it’s properly delivered into the skin.’
Sophie Shotter, aesthetic doctor and founder of Illuminate Skin Clinics, agrees ‘Salicylic acid is just one ingredient that can be efficacious or irritating,’ she says ‘There’s so much variation in products based on how they’re formulated.’ In theory, a more expensive product will be better designed to treat the skin effectively.
Duping also presents a moral conundrum for consumers who pride themselves on their sustainable values, adds Kendall. At a time when Gen Z and millennials are known as the generations pushing to roll back on consumerism, dupes appear to go against those beliefs.’ Cheap prices make it easier to engage with every trend, she explains, and the bigger the hype surrounding the dupe, the higher the spending on dupe culture.
This, in turn, increases the amount of beauty waste – and beauty waste is seismic; an estimated 120bn units of packaging are produced every year by the global cosmetics industry, most of which isn’t recycled. That’s before you consider the untold hours of creative labour. For Alice du Parcq, creator of the IG live show Desert Island Spritz, nowhere is this labour being undermined more than in perfumery. ‘The fragrance blend is fine-tuned for months, then there’s the research behind the synthetics that make a fragrance sing, or the raw naturals that involve months of sourcing and contract agreements to support farming communities,’she explains.
‘When a dupe comes along that effectively copycats a major perfume by sending it through a computer, you can only imagine how exasperated the original creators feel.’ Beyond the murky ethics of intellectual property theft, there’s the question of who else loses out when you dupe.
Take (the often duped) Benefit, for example. Its Bold Is Beautiful programme, which supports women and girls in communities worldwide, has raised £20.3m since it launched in 2015. When consumers choose dupes instead of original products, initiatives like this could miss out.
But while the reasons not to dupe are justifiable, there are plenty who argue that the vilification of duping culture is unfair - particularly in this economic climate. Over the past year alone, inflation has seen the cost of deodorant increase by 12% while the average cost of mascara has risen by 68p to a new high of £9.36. Dupes, argues Awan, allow women to keep the same routine for less. ‘We’ve had lots of feed backback from people who’ve been financially struggling saying that Dupeshop has helped them to save money.’
The idea that price equates to quality is also far from clear-cut, as the arrival of brands such as The Ordinary and Beauty Pie has demonstrated; the business model of the latter showing that when you prioritise customer reviews over big marketing budgets, you can sell high-quality ingredients at low price points. ‘The cat’s out of the bag,’ adds Awan, who says dupes will continue to thrive for this very reason. ‘True dupe culture isn’t about ripping off brands, it’s about educating consumers so that they can control how they spend their money.’
The bottom line? Engaging in dupe culture doesn’t have to be a cancellable offence – but it does require some smarts. Yes, that serum might save you that extra seven quid, but are you sidestepping a sustainability pledge that supports the people who grow your product’s ingredients? Doing your homework, shopping around and taking pause before you purchase might be advice you’ve heard before, but it’s also advice worth duplicating.