For every high-end beauty product, you can now find something similar – and for a fraction of the price. As so-called dupe culture gains ground, WH asks who’s really profiting...
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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 astheonesyougetfor less. But beauty buyers needn’t wait for sale season to bag a bargain.
Welcometodupe culture, where products from high-end brands are replicated by competitorsfora fraction of the price. Shortforduplicate, dupes’ budget-friendly powershaveseenthem ascend faster than a Strictly contestant doing the quickstep. The hashtag #beautydupe has 93m views on TikTok and according to research by Mintel, 74%ofmake-upusers agree that affordable products work just as well as premium ones. Meanwhile, overonDupeshop – an online beauty platformthatpitsbeauty dupes against their pricier counterparts – traffic has increased by107% 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
