The beauty industry’s relationship with dupes is changing.
Stateside, E.l.f. Beauty, Colourpop and L’Oréal-owned Nyx, as well as heritage mass brands like Maybelline, CoverGirl and L’Oréal Paris, all sell some sort of product dupes as part of their evolving business strategy.
Meanwhile, global power players that built their businesses on dupes are expanding to the states. Australia-based MCoBeauty launched stateside at the end of last year, while Germany’s Cosnova, which owns Catrice and Essence, passed $1 billion in yearly sales in January, just a year after expanding its focus to the U.S. market.
According to a 2024 study by Mintel market research company, seven in 10 makeup users have purchased a dupe, and more than half of those surveyed actively look for makeup dupes on social media.
As a colloquial term, the word “dupe” is shorthand for “duplicate” and loosely denotes a product that is inspired by a higher-priced item, often a category leader or buzzy luxury offering. A dupe has its own identity and branding, which is very different from a counterfeit product presenting itself as the original.
In the ‘90s and 2000s, “designer imposter perfume” was the butt of jokes. Today, beauty sales are partially held up by young shoppers that confidently buy lower-cost fragrance and makeup dupes.
For example, MCoBeauty sells recognizable dupes for popular products from brands like Charlotte Tilbury, Drunk Elephant, Sol de Janeiro and Laneige for around a third of the price. Its best-selling Flawless Glow Foundation retails for $14.99, and its Miracle Flawless Pressed Powder goes for $9.99. Similar products from Charlotte Tilbury retail for $49 and $28, respectively. MCo launched into 1,300 Target doors and 1,700 Kroger stores this year.
But the rise of dupes in popular culture is more than a shift in consumer acceptance; it’s part of a larger manufacturing change that’s almost impossible for brands to avoid.
“You have this really fast-changing consumer landscape and this really slow manufacturing process, and those two things don’t line up, so brands are doing whatever they can to move faster,” Nick Benson, founder of beauty manufacturing platform Atelier, told Glossy. “Speed is important, not just because you want to meet the consumers where they are, but also because the duration [of new product development] directly impacts the unit economics of the organization.”
For example, if an innovative new product takes three years to develop before it hits shelves using a traditional supply chain — a common timeframe a decade ago — the risk that the consumer will have lost interest or moved on to a new trend, formula, ingredient or brand is exponentially higher than it was years ago.
“Moving fast is really hard, … but the longer it takes you, the higher the burden is,” Benson said. “[For many brands], the way to move fast is to bring to market something that’s already been made.”
For many brands, a good dupe is a point of pride. “Some people will go, ‘Dupes are not original.’ But actually, accessibility is a form of innovation,” MCoBeauty CMO Meridith Rojas told Glossy in February. “We’re in this moment, in this cultural zeitgeist, where people don’t want to have to spend $1,000 on a face of beauty and don’t want to be left out of the trends.”
Partnered with the uncertainty of new global tariffs under President Trump — many of which target global manufacturing hubs like China, Hong Kong, Japan and Korea — a fast, efficient and streamlined supply chain is a top goal for nearly all business leaders.
“The brands that win in the next five to 10 years, in the new normal, are the ones that are going to be dynamic, flexible, fast and efficient at creating a product,” Benson told Glossy.
This is compounded by a lack of legal precedent on dupes. That is, outside of a few privately settled, splashy lawsuits among beauty industry power players, few legal precedents have been set against the long-term viability of beauty dupes. For example, complaints filed against MCoBeauty by Charlotte Tilbury and Tarte have been settled privately, outside of court, so it’s tough for a legal team to point to one example where today’s popular dupes have been proved unlawful. What’s more, E.l.f. Beauty won a lawsuit lodged by Benefit earlier this year for its $6 Lash N Roll mascara, which Benefit claimed was a copycat of its $29 Roller Lash mascara.
“Brands today are taking different stances,” said Elizabeth Milian, esq., managing partner at Miami intellectual property firm Milian Legal Group. “Some brands take a scorched earth policy and send cease-and-desist letters” to everyone who dupes them, while others are less concerned with chasing dupes. “There will be a good portion of brands that say, ‘We’re aware of it, and we’re not going to do anything,’ whether they think [the dupe of their product is] sufficiently different or they’re taking the position that nobody can actually produce something of their sort of quality.”
As consumer acceptance of dupes has evolved, and brands creating them are increasingly more litigious, so has a good legal strategy to protect one’s I.P. A successful suit normally has a “fact pattern” where the duper frequently violates applicable I.P. or misleads the consumer into thinking they’re buying the original product, said Milian. For example, a word or phrase in the dupe’s name that is reminiscent of the original product or an identical packaging component can trigger legal trouble for the duper.
However, the next frontier of enforcing IP across the dupe category could lie squarely with retailers and influencers. Milian told Glossy that instead of coming after brands for I.P. infringement, more suits are being raised against influencers and marketplace sites disseminating false claims or misleading information.
“[There are] cases being decided where these platforms and these influencers are potentially on the hook for certain [violations], depending on how they are talking about the products or how they present the products,” she said. “You have to start thinking, ‘Has this new landscape warranted a change in strategy [of how we monitor dupes or enforce IP]? Are we needing to monitor things much more closely?’” Regardless, Milian recommends brands seek legal counsel to help make these decisions, no matter which side you’re on.
