Inside the Complex World of Fragrance Dupes

Dossier's creations are not counterfeits. Counterfeit perfumes, like a counterfeit handbag, explicitly mislead consumers by pretending to come from a brand with which they have no affiliation, and are therefore illegal, if relatively common. Nor are Dossier scents what you might consider knockoffs; as with luxury fashion, scents originating in high-end perfume trickle down to the mass market all the time. But it takes a discerning nose to recognize that, say, Zara Gardenia is a riff on YSL Black Opium, just like it would take a knowledgeable shopper to see that Zara's Mini City Bag features traces of Balenciaga's Hourglass Bag.   

The dupe model for brands like Dossier is unique to perfume. These companies explicitly lean on consumers' awareness of a well-established brand and claim to sell a nearly identical product, but stripped of expensive packaging and marketing. Alt Fragrances, founded in 2018 by commercial real estate developer Michael Saba, also sells lower-priced scents "inspired by" many luxury creations. Lazy Royal, which launched in 2022, does the same with candles and reed diffusers. Oakcha and Montagne — the latter of which goes so far as to use a typeface similar to the typewriter font used by Le Labo in its packaging — are two more examples. Lazy Royal, Oakcha, and Montagne did not return Allure’s request for comment for this article.

These brands can exist because, unlike logos or monograms, fragrance formulas are not protected by copyright. Plus, they offer an attractive model to consumers: By claiming to "democratize" fragrance through lower prices, dupe brands position themselves as the David to big perfume's Goliath, delivering prized formulas to the masses without the brand and celebrity markup. 

Critics of dupes, however, say they dilute the artistic creations of perfumers, also known as "noses" in the industry, who often devote years of study, expertise, and hours of research to create a single scent. "As an independent perfumer, I am generally against duplicating works of art," says Yosh Han, creative director of fragrance house Scent Trunk. "If the resources spent on development and marketing were applied towards supporting original designs and educating consumers, the fragrance industry would evolve. Dupes are the equivalent of fast fashion."

It is not altogether notable that brands jump at the opportunity to sell cheap scents, but the rising popularity of dupes is an indication of more than just a demand for affordable products. For some, it is also symptomatic of decades of marketing strategies that have failed to educate consumers about the craftsmanship involved in creating perfume.  

According to Maison Francis Kurkdjian CEO and cofounder Marc Chaya, it is a problem of the perfume industry's own making. "Why are people attracted to dupes? It's because we are facing a situation of ignorance," he says. "This trend is exactly deriving from years and years and years of uncontrolled messaging in marketing, where perfumers were for a very long time denied the right to exist."

Chaya, who began his career in finance and marketing, says he too was largely uneducated about perfume when he first met Francis Kurkdjian, unaware that he was the perfumer behind scents like Jean Paul Gaultier's Le Male. The two founded MFK in 2009; the brand was then acquired by LVMH in 2017. Chaya describes his mission as putting the perfumer — whose creations he likens to works of art for their ability to inspire emotion in the wearers — back in the spotlight. 

"Marketing has been an extraordinary developer and an extraordinary destroyer of value in this industry," Chaya says. Designer and celebrity perfume campaigns have successfully created a fantasy world for fragrance, but they have also erased the work of the perfumer behind the scent and, in the process, left consumers skeptical about the foundation perfumes are really built on, besides a high-profile spokesperson. 

"There are many players that are very happy with this gap, with the fact that [intellectual property] rights are not recognized to perfumers," says Chaya. "Because they would be facing the challenge of having to pay royalty to past perfumers. So, in order to crack the model, first we need to reeducate customers." Part of that education should include making the general public aware of how it is relatively easy to replicate a fragrance these days, thanks to new technology.

"The industry used to be very much based on gentlemen's agreements," says Charles Cronin, adjunct professor at Claremont Graduate University and a visiting scholar at George Washington University Law School, who has written frequently on copyright and intellectual property.

For decades, fragrance formulation has been mostly the domain of just a few major flavor and fragrance giants, like Givaudan, Firmenich, and International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF), which employ many of the perfumers making the most well-known scents on the market and to whom perfume brands would typically outsource production of a perfume formula itself. But with the advent of gas chromatography, technology that was developed in the 20th century and allows for the separation, identification, and quantification of aroma compounds in a perfume sample, new competitors can simply reverse engineer a fragrance and resell it under a new name. Without making the prior investment to develop that scent, it can be cheap to do so. 

"The price of the fragrance reflects, at least to some extent, the enormous [research and development] of that creation," Cronin says. And sales from a successful fragrance are necessary to fund the creation of new products. "I think the name houses are particularly bothered by the fact that these smell-alike fragrances have not invested in the R&D, but have capitalized on their R&D by simply reverse engineering a successful fragrance and creating a much less expensive version."