The Dupe Isn't the Problem: The Story Around It Is
Two products can share 90% of the same formula and still be nothing alike on skin.
That's the part dupe culture conversations keep missing. Everyone wants to argue about the INCI list: who copied whose actives, whose percentages line up a little too neatly. But as a product developer, the INCI list is the least interesting part of the comparison. The real gap sits in texture, stability, and overall story. The parts that never make it onto a label and never show up in a side-by-side ingredient screenshot.
You can hand two labs the same ten actives and get two completely different products. Formula differentiation matters less than positioning..
So the "dupe" isn't really a copy. It's a different set of decisions wearing the same ingredient deck.
Where the line gets blurry
None of this means dupe culture is ethically flat. There's a real, meaningful difference between two kinds of "duping," and the industry keeps collapsing them into one conversation.
The first: someone builds a more affordable product that performs as well as a high-end original. Different brand, different packaging, different story; just a genuinely competitive formula at a lower price point. That's not theft. That's market access. Not everyone can or should pay $70 for a moisturiser, and there's real, honest work in engineering a $15 version that holds up.
The second: someone replicates the packaging, the positioning, the tone of voice, the entire narrative, and then puts a similar formula inside it. That's not a dupe. That's lifting someone's creative and strategic work and wearing it as a costume.
I think there's room in this industry for both accessible and high-end tiers to exist. But accessible shouldn't mean "identical down to the story." The formula and purpose can be shared territory. The brand, the packaging language, the world someone built around a product, that's should not be.
NYC, April 2025
I sat in on this exact debate in person, at BeautyMatter's FUTURE50 summit in New York, a panel called "Innovation vs. Imitation: Exploring Opportunities within Dupe Culture." It was, without exaggeration, the most tense room I've been in at an industry event. You could feel the audience split in real time.
MCoBeauty's CMO argued dupe culture is democratisation: why shouldn't someone get the luxury experience for a fraction of the price. Dossier's founder made the case for radical transparency, naming the fragrance that inspired each launch rather than pretending otherwise. And Jolie's CEO, whose brand has been cloned repeatedly, pushed back hardest, arguing the real question isn't whether you get copied, it's whether you keep innovating fast enough that copying doesn't matter.
Nobody on that stage fully agreed with each other, and the audience didn't either. Which is exactly why it's worth talking about honestly instead of settling for the usual "dupes are theft" or "dupes are democratisation" one-liners. Both are true, depending on what's actually being copied.
Innovation vs. Imitation: Exploring Opportunities within Dupe Culture
The actual opportunity
If you're building a brand right now, the dupe conversation isn't a threat to manage, it's a forcing function. It pushes you to ask what you're actually selling: is it the formula, or is it everything you built around it? If a $15 version of your product could match your performance and your business model collapses because of it, the formula was never your real differentiator.
The brands that will hold up aren't the ones hiding their formulas. They're the ones whose story, packaging, and point of view couldn't be duplicated even if someone had the exact same INCI list in hand.
Copy the chemistry if you must. You can't dupe conviction.
