Hello friends! I hope you all had a great weekend, and if you celebrate, a great Easter! To get my week rolling, I wanted to write a post about a topic that was highly debated in the last few weeks in the beauty world – dupes.

I have been aware of dupes since I first got into the social media world of makeup. A dupe is basically a cheaper of alternative product to another product that is similar in color or formula. In fact, one of my favorite instagram accounts ever, Dupethat, focuses strictly on duping and showing swatches of products side by side that are similar, or in many cases identical to one another.

Dupes for high-end products are especially great for those of us with tight budgets that love the look of pricier makeup. Let’s say you really love the shade of a certain lipstick but can’t justify the price tag, if you throw the name of that item + dupe into a google search bar, you might just find a cheaper alternative. If you’re the creator of the original item, though, you might have a problem with dupes, especially if they look almost exactly like your product right down to the packaging.

This is where I bring you to the drama; Kat Von D recently stirred up some controversy on instagram after a fan brought to her attention a company called Makeup Revolution. Makeup Revolution has a brand new product in Ulta stores, the Light & Shade Palette ($15), which bares a striking resemblance to KVD’s very famous Shade & Light Palette ($48). KVD then took to her personal instagram (a smart move not posting on her company’s instagram, in my opinion) to express her disgust:

As you can see, she called the MUR palette a knockoff, a bootleg, and called the company “lazy fucks”. After receiving a lot of hate from this post, many people expressing that not everyone can afford her makeup (and even some people thanking her for showing them a dupe), she then made a youtube video further explaining where she was coming from, and how as an artist and the creator of her brand she spends a lot of time and effort coming up with her products.

Obviously, I don’t want to sit here and just report to you a story that is three weeks old, but I instead wanting to raise a question: are dupes really just rip-offs?

Like I said earlier, I have been aware of dupes since I start exploring makeup online, and in my honest opinion, I think a lot of dupes are probably coincidences (I mean, how many shades of dusty-pink blush can there possibly be in the world?). However, so many famous products get duped purposely just because of how crazy popular they are, like the KVD palette above. One thing that I have seen more dupes for than I can count is the Urban Decay Naked Palette ($54), probably to the point where most people would not even be phased by a Naked dupe because of how crazy the hype was for that palette and how much it inspired basically every other makeup company to release a similar neutral eye palette to meet the demand.

Obviously if you are just someone who likes those types of colors or eye looks, you might not care about buying a brand name item but will instead probably just go for what you could afford (like Elf’s Need It Nude Palette ($10)). It might not even occur to you that the Elf palette is similar to anything else, whether intentional or not (that name though?). I think the Makeup Revolution vs Kat Von D thing was different to a lot of people though, not only where there similar colors or names, but the packaging was not even trying to be subtle about being a dupe.

The two arguments for MUR that I kept seeing over and over were: “not everyone can afford KVD” and “MUR is known for duping high-end products, it’s nothing new” which is true and is how I first found MUR. So, question number one for the day: is it okay for companies to create cheaper alternatives for higher-end products?

Makeup Revolution actually released a statement in response to all of this controversy, stating that their goal is to create trendy makeup that is accessible to everyone. My personal point of view, is do they literally have to copy down to the letter to do this (literally don’t even know how they get away with their dupes legally)? There are SO many affordable brands that absolutely kill it in originality and quality, but on the other hand if a look is really trendy that is specifically being created by one product or brand that is pricey, then of coarse people are going to want more affordable alternatives.

One thing to look at in our lives is fashion – I can promise you that the things you are wearing right now were at one time inspired by big name runway looks (insert Meryl Streep’s rant from The Devil Wears Prada here). MUR argued that their makeup was no different than runway to department store fashion. An example of trending that I can think of in the makeup world is highlighting and strobing – when highlighters first became a thing it was pretty much strictly found only in high-end makeup, but now almost every drugstore brand has a highlighter available, and so many of them are better than the more expensive alternatives.

One argument against dupes, that is a very good point, is that while an affordable product can look like an expensive product, it might not perform like a high-end product. In Kat Von D’s video, she expresses that with her own personal cosmetic line you are not paying for her name, but instead paying for her high quality formula as well as the effort she puts into everything about her products down to the packaging (she takes you into her studio to see her art that she hand draws for her packaging, which I thought was very cool. I can personally speak for the quality of KVD’s products, I absolutely adore them and her eyeshadow formula is hands down my favorite formula of all time. As much as I also love MUR, their formula is good (especially for the price) but is definitely not KVD’s.

Like I stating in the beginning of this post, a product can most definitely dupe a formula, though, which is why you can find dupes for foundations and primers etc.

One of the things that KVD says bothered her the most was that she put so much time into that specific palette, getting the layout exactly how she wanted it, so it upset her that another brand would just blatantly use the same layout. This is where I guess my understanding of dupes kind of stops – when you put a product on your face and you like the outcome, who cares what the packaging looks like? Of coarse you might want sturdy packaging or something that lays out colors in a way you that can inspire looks or something that could survive travel etc., but no one looking at you is going to know what the heck your eyeshadow palette sitting in your drawer at home looks like or if it resembles the very product it is duping.

Like I’ve ranted about before in my Eyeshadow Palette Mayhem post, it just feels gimmicky to me. For instance, Too Faced is famous for their Chocolate Bar palettes ($26 – $49) which look and smell like chocolate. Makeup Revolution/Tam Beauty also has a series of chocolate bar looking palettes ($14+), and while some are dupes of TF, a lot of them are actually original in their color schemes. Why put them in chocolate bar packaging then unless you are truly just trying to suck people in with the adorable packaging that looks like the high-end stuff? I would be a liar if I didn’t say that I loved cute packaging, but I guess at the end of the day a product could be wrapped in ripped up tin foil for all I cared, as long as it looked good on my face.

This brings me to things that are literally just cheap knock-offs or counterfeits. Just like you can get a counterfeit designer bag, you can definitely get counterfeit makeup products or brushes (I know unicorn brushes were all the rage earlier this year, now everyone is counterfeiting fish tail brushes). This is why, like with the Sillisponge, you’ll see companies stating they are the original – because the hype literally caused people to create fakes for profit, but to me this is way different than duping something.

Anyway, I am going to leave it up to you. Are dupes just the natural progression of trends in the makeup world, or are they knock-offs and totally unoriginal? Personally, sometimes I really just don’t care who makes what, if I like the thing I’m going to buy the thing and wear the thing. This is especially true for literally anything that is not eyeshadow, I am completely not picky about lipsticks or blushes etc. as long as it gets the job done – so if Urban Decay makes a really rad purple lipstick, but Nyx makes a very similar purple lipstick for a cheaper price, I’ll go for the cheaper price. You might be more picky about lips, though, and might want the more effective formula – I know I’m completely picky about eyeshadow, so it all comes down to personal preferences and finances.

I know this was a very different post than what I normally do (more opinion based than probably helpful), so since I shared my opinion, I would love it if you shared yours in the comments!

Also, I know I’ve said multiple times I wanted to do a palette series on my blog, I also had an idea to do a gimmick series since I talk about gimmicks so much, basically looking at the latest gimmicky/trendy products and seeing whether or not I think they are worth it or not. Just a thought!

As always thank you for reading, if you haven’t already please subscribe to my blog if you are a wordpress user, or sign up for email alerts (it helps me a lot!), and if you haven’t already check out my blog’s instagram (spookylipsandfathips). If you have any ideas or requests for next week’s post, please let me know, and have a great week!

-Lacie ❤︎❤︎❤︎