Among the shops that line Brighton’s eclectic Gardner Street is Eden Perfumes, a local purveyor of more than 300 fragrances. When I visit, on a weekday morning in late February, a client had just popped in to refill a perfume. Rows of large bottle-shaped dispensers are hung upside down on two of the shop’s whitewashed walls, their fragrances ready to be tested.
A sales assistant hands me a cardboard mouillette spritzed with Eden’s No 545, also called “Shelimars”, a dead ringer for my favourite perfume, Guerlain’s Shalimar. “If you like Shalimar, you can also try our version of Yves Saint Laurent’s Black Opium,” she says eagerly, handing me more mouillettes.
While I smell them, she informs me that the fragrances are all vegan and made in Brighton; and that the company is family-owned (a detail I did not have an opportunity to verify, as Eden didn’t respond to my request for an interview). Back in the office, I pass my wrist under some colleagues’ noses. “I know what that is, it’s Vivienne Westwood’s Boudoir! I wore it for years,” one says. It’s actually Eden’s “Boudior” — the Vivienne Westwood fragrance was discontinued in 2019.
Eden is one among a growing number of companies offering affordable imitations of luxury fragrances known as dupes (or, as the companies who make them call them, “inspired-by perfumes”). In the Eden shop, a laminated menu lists fragrances by their number, olfactive family (oriental floral, floral fruity) and vaguely familiar names — “Adore Women” has the same orange and rose notes of Dior’s J’adore (£42 compared with £122 for 100ml), “Million Dollar Lady” includes raspberry and neroli like Rabanne’s Lady Million (£30 compared with £89 for 50ml). The company is open about its aim. “Our inspired perfumes replicate luxury brands and are vegan, cruelty-free and made from the finest natural ingredients. You can enjoy premium fragrances that are affordable, ethical and sustainable,” reads a tagline on the company’s website.
The business of fragrance dupes is not new — L’Oréal initiated a legal case against replica perfumes by Bellure back in 2007 — but lately more companies have joined in, taking advantage of the social media-fuelled craze for beauty dupes and the accessibility of ecommerce. There are more than 25,000 videos on TikTok under the combined hashtag #perfumedupe and #perfumedupes, where influencers rate imitation fragrances and tell viewers where to find them.
“Dupes are so accessible today,” says Susan Scafidi, academic director of the Fashion Law Institute at Fordham University in New York. “You don’t have to go to a brick-and-mortar store in a downscale shopping centre or a dodgy part of town to find them. Everything is available via the same channel — the internet — and so there is this sense of legitimacy for dupes that did not exist 10 or 20 years ago.”
There is no estimate available for the market size of beauty dupes, but shoppers are open to them. Some 32 per cent of the 4,000 British consumers surveyed by Barclays last year said that they were buying dupes due to the rising cost of living, with fragrances being the most sought-after items.
Aishwarya Rajpara, senior research analyst at Euromonitor, says the popularity of dupes can be seen in the growth of the mass-market perfume category, which includes white label products from M&S and Aldi. These retailers don’t promote their products as dupes, but they don’t have to: influencers are quick to feature them in videos as alternatives to premium brand’s items. “We see a good growth in the private label because of this trend,” says Rajpara.
Some inspired-by fragrance companies have grown into sizeable businesses. Northern Irish company The Essence Vault, which, states its website, offers “great fragrances inspired by lots of the high-street brands”, doubled its revenues in 2023 to £30mn, according to filings to Companies House. American brand Dossier, which launched in 2018, is sold in Walmart and is now producing original scents alongside imitations. And Australian company MCo Beauty, which has been selling “luxe products at a luxe-for-less price” since 2020, was recently acquired by pharmaceutical business DBG Health in a deal that valued it at A$1bn (£490mn).
Unlike companies selling counterfeits, businesses specialising in homage fragrances are legally legitimate. “Perfume is sometimes compared to food or recipes because it’s something that is not straightforward to protect,” explains Julie Canet, associate at intellectual property company Marks & Clerk. Brands can trademark their name and the overall look of the product, but the fragrance itself qualifies neither as an invention, which would allow it to be patented, nor as a work of art, which falls under copyright law. “Brands can keep the recipe of their fragrances secret, but if someone independently finds a similar scent, you can’t do anything,” continues Canet.
Because most dupe brands openly describe their products as “interpretations” of a branded item — rather than claiming to be an exact copy — and don’t straightforwardly copy bottles or logos, they are typically immune to lawsuits for trademark infringement, even when they do refer to a trademarked name in the description of their product.
“They are exploiting a loophole in trademark law which is referred to as ‘nominative fair use’ of the name, which means using the name [but] not as a source indicator,” explains Scafidi. “In trademark, it all comes down to the question of whether the consumer is confused, and a consumer who is reading the message ‘this smells like Tom Ford’s Black Orchid but it’s not’ is not going to be confused.”
So how do these companies recreate famous scents? According to Richard Stamelman, professor emeritus at Williams College in Massachusetts and author of Perfume: Joy, Scandal, Sin, it’s all about gas chromatography, a way to “analyse any kind of smell and break it up into its chemical elements and ingredients”, he explains. “[Dupe brands] can figure out more or less what’s in any perfume that is subjected to it.”
What’s undoubtedly harder is nailing the balance between said ingredients, he says: “Perfumes have an architecture — they have a top note or a head note, a middle note or hard note, and a base note or a soul note. The composition has to be balanced.”
He is not surprised that I found Eden’s version of Shalimar unpleasant, too alcoholic and pungent. The fragrance is part of a group of perfumes known as sulfureux, or sulphureous, which are heavy and usually leave a strong sillage, or trail. That’s created by ingredients in the soul note: strong elements such as incense, castoreum and musk. Those elements hold the perfume together, but in dupes they can also easily knock it out of balance.
Stamelman doubts that dupe brands can afford to use the same ingredients that high-end fragrances use, given dupes’ low retail prices. This can influence their olfactory balance and their durability. The concentrate developed from the iris root, known as orris root absolute, for example, takes four to five years to develop. One half tonne of orris root produces one kilogramme of the absolute, which at one time sold for about $65,000, according to Stamelman. The best synthetics ingredients, which are now commonly used in luxury fragrances, are also pricey and usually patented by the large chemical companies that create them, such as International Flavors & Fragrances, Firmenich and Givaudan.
“A lot of these dupe [brands] are not going to be able to afford them,” says Stamelman.
Despite the ubiquity of fragrance dupes, industry organisations and even brands don’t seem overly worried about their impact on market share. “Companies are normally very fast to address issues with trade organisations. We did not receive in the past nor now any request for action in this regard,” says the executive of a large fragrance association, who would only speak on condition of anonymity. Brands are much more concerned about changes in regulations. “A lot of perfumers are reformulating existing fragrances to adhere to new standards. This has a greater impact on your balance sheet than homage fragrances.”
The widely held assumption is that clients interested in “inspired by” fragrances are not the same ones who buy the original high-end perfumes. “The luxury perfume market in 2023 was $12.6bn and it’s estimated that by 2032 it will go up to $20bn,” says Stamelman. “It’s a big market. Whether the dupes will ever cut into that, I doubt it.”
But, he adds, “perfume prices are outrageous.”
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