Beauty dupe debate: Compliance decides which brands survive, not price

Cosmetic dupes and their positioning in the personal care industry remain a topic of debate. The nuances of regulatory compliance, efficacy claims, and accusations of low-price-point products riding premium coattails persist.

Recently, the debate around dupes found new kindling after Charlotte Tilbury told the BBC that “when you dupe, you dupe the consumer.”

In response, Lee Bryan, founder and CEO at Arcus Compliance weighs in on the debate from the perspective of the duping brand, arguing that — if done right — the products are just as compliant with regulations as the originals. He tells Personal Care Insights that claims around performance and comparisons can create risk, as consumers may already be dubious of dupes, giving them more to prove.

“Dupes are often perceived as copying someone else’s work, fairly or not, so these brands tend to start with less benefit of the doubt than others on the shelf. That is exactly why compliance has to be watertight,” says Bryan.

He explains that the biggest risk to dupe reputation — which may pose a more significant threat than fines — arises when brands make exaggerated or unsupported claims.

Social media is also presenting a new set of challenges as dupes can be held responsible for a brand-affiliated influencer’s claim that a dupe works just as well as a prestige product, independent of what appears on a product’s packaging. 

Bryan tells us that many beauty products may originate from the same white-label manufacturers, selling essentially “identical” formulas under different names and prices. 

However, Tilbury said in her interview to the BBC: “I have looked at those dupes, and they do not [perform at the quality that Charlotte Tilbury products do]. If I could do them for those prices, I would.”

Bryan argues that the core differentiator between the market successes in products with similar formulations may be branding, due diligence, and rigorous compliance frameworks.

Strong compliance frameworks can help dupe brands build consumer trust.If dupes are subject to the same cosmetic regulations as established products, where do you see the greatest compliance risks emerging in practice?

Bryan: The industry keeps arguing about a distinction that regulators do not actually need to resolve. A counterfeit pretends to be the original and infringes on somebody’s intellectual property. A dupe competes openly on similarity and, done properly, is entirely legal. The dupe brand usually intends to comply and falls short on evidence rather than intent. The regulator does not need to settle the philosophy. They ask one question, which is ‘Show me the file.’

On claims, the risk is structural rather than accidental. The moment you position a product against a prestige original, you have imported that product’s performance promise without importing any of its evidence. The Common Criteria require evidential support for what a claim implies, not simply for what it states, and the fairness criterion is explicit that a claim must not create confusion with a competitor’s product.

The word dupe walks straight into that. What makes it worse is that most brands in this space did not develop their own formulation, so they do not hold the substantiation either. They are leaning on a manufacturer’s dossier that may have been assembled for a different claim set, a different concentration, or a different market entirely. The honest test is simple. If a regulator asks for the study behind your headline claim tomorrow morning, do you have it, or are you emailing your supplier and hoping?

Safety documentation fails for the same reason. Cost-down reformulation is the economics of this category, and every reformulation is a new safety assessment. In practice, brands change the fragrance house, swap a raw material supplier, shave a percentage, and never reopen the report. The file ends up describing a product that no longer exists. Layer on the fact that UK and EU annexes have diverged since Brexit, and a brand selling into both markets on a single dossier is exposed in at least one of them without knowing it.

How difficult is it for regulators and consumers to distinguish between a legitimate dupe and a product that crosses the line into inadequate substantiation? 

Bryan: For consumers, it is close to impossible because price is the only visible signal, and price is precisely the thing being sold to them. Nobody is reading a Product Information File in a shop. But the more uncomfortable answer is that in a lot of cases, you cannot distinguish the products at all, because they are not different products.

Here is the pattern I see constantly. A founder borrows money from family, finds a white-label manufacturer, picks a base formulation out of a catalog, puts their brand on it, and launches. Six months later, somebody else does the same thing, with the same manufacturer, off the same base. Neither of them copied the other. Neither of them owns the formulation. The contract manufacturer owns that.So you now have two products on the market that are chemically identical, sold under different names, at different prices, with different stories attached. Are they dupes of each other? In the consumer sense, obviously. That tells you something the dupes debate keeps missing. If the product is identical, the product cannot be the differentiator. The only thing separating those two brands is what they built around it. Whether they did proper due diligence on the manufacturer or took the sales pitch at face value. Whether they commissioned their own safety assessment or accepted an assurance. Whether they hold their own file or simply assume somebody else is holding one for them.

For regulators, this is getting easier rather than harder, and the numbers show it. The EU’s eSurveillance crawler inspected more than 1.6 million URLs last year, and a second proactive crawler has now launched that goes looking for problems rather than matching listings against alerts already raised. Cosmetics have been the most notified category on Safety Gate for three years running, at 36% of alerts in 2025, with close to 100 alerts a week across all categories. I would be careful about reading that as a market that suddenly became more dangerous. Inspection, investigation, and referral are being automated. Notifications are rising because detection is rising. 

This is why this matters commercially and not just ethically. When enforcement arrives, one of those two identical brands turns the inspection around inside aUnsupported performance claims can create regulatory risks for beauty brands. 

week because its file is complete and current. The other goes quiet, then panics, then withdraws stock and ends up in a recall. Same molecules, same factory, potentially the same batch, completely different commercial outcome. When the formulation is not yours, your compliance position is the only defensible ground you have.

Could brands increasingly using social media marketing to position products as affordable alternatives to prestige products create regulatory challenges?

Bryan: It already has, and the reason is that the legal exposure has quietly moved off the label and into the caption, while cosmetics regulation was built around the pack. The claim that actually sells a dupe is rarely printed on the carton. It is spoken by somebody else, on somebody else’s feed, in a format nobody in the business ever signed off on.

Two things trip founders up here. The first is that an implied comparison is still a comparison. Saying a product works just like a named prestige original is a performance claim that needs evidence behind it, a comparative advertising claim in its own right, and a direct run at the fairness criterion that prohibits creating confusion with a competitor’s product. Nothing about that changes because it was said casually to the camera. The second is ownership of the claim. If you briefed it, gifted it, paid for it, or approved it, it is yours. Brands file influencer output under earned media. Regulators file it under advertising you control, and that gap is where the trouble sits.

The enforcement backdrop has shifted underneath all of this, too. Since April 2025, the CMA (Competition and Markets Authority) has been able to determine consumer law breaches itself and impose penalties of up to 10 percent of global turnover, without going anywhere near a court. Most beauty founders have not yet absorbed what that means for the content they commission.

And spoken claims are no longer ephemeral. A 30-second video is machine transcribable, and the same automation that is driving Safety Gate volumes reads captions perfectly well. The claim you never wrote down is now indexed, searchable, and permanent. Meanwhile, if you have positioned on equivalence and the consumer experiences anything less, you have engineered your own complaint pipeline, and complaints are exactly what feeds the systems now doing the looking.

Social media marketing is increasing compliance pressure on beauty dupes. 

Given the heightened reputational scrutiny surrounding dupes, what should brands do to demonstrate that lower price points have not come at the expense of safety, efficacy, or compliance?

Bryan: The first thing is to reject the premise buried in the question, because cheap does not mean unsafe. Undocumented means unsafe. Some of the best-evidenced products on the market are inexpensive, and some of the worst documented products I have seen carried a three-figure price tag. Price tells you about positioning. It tells you nothing about the file.

The operative word is ‘demonstrate,’ and that is the whole game. Compliance you cannot evidence within a week is not compliance; it is a belief. In practice, that means holding a live claim register, so that every claim in every market is mapped to the evidence supporting it, with social and influencer content sitting inside that register rather than outside it. It means version controlling the safety file so that a formulation change automatically triggers reassessment, dated and recorded, because speed is not the problem, but undocumented speed absolutely is.

It means screening ingredients against each destination market before launch rather than after a query, since dupes go multi-market fast and the annexes no longer align. It means running post-market surveillance that genuinely exists, with an adverse event log and a recall procedure somebody has actually rehearsed. And it means bringing your Responsible Person in before the campaign goes live, rather than after the regulator calls.

Go back to those two identical white-label products. Nothing about the formulation, the factory, or the price point decided which of them survived. Diligence did. The brands that come through the next two years will not be the ones that argued loudest that they were legitimate. They will be the ones who could prove it on a Tuesday morning, at short notice, to a system that found them automatically.