Thrown For a Dupe
Product and packaging rip-offs have long been a moral debate in beauty. But does imitation still matter when brands are launching dupes that skip the look—and copy everything else?
“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” That’s one way to look at it. For the brands being copied, it usually feels more like the “sincerest form of fuckery,” as one founder told me.
Late last year, journalist and Substacker Cheryl Wischhover wrote an illuminating story on the power of dupes, specifically as a case study of MCo Beauty. I’m not going to rehash all the stats Wischhover shared about the brand. (Please read it!) But MCo’s rise to power is something I’ve personally been fascinated by — perhaps even in awe of — since they entered the U.S. market in 2024. To some, their rise is tasteless and wrong, as it infringes on the work of hard working individuals. But their dominance forces an uncomfortable fact the industry rarely wants to sit with: in today’s beauty landscape, isn’t everyone duping everyone else — just with better branding language?
“Where the Hell Did They Come From?”
In April of 2024, Kensington Tillo posted about the brand to her 1M followers on TikTok during Coachella. MCo was a sponsor of the Poosh house1 where Tillo was staying. She hadn’t spoken about the brand prior, and upon closer inspection, all the products were straight up knockoffs of brands TikTok already knew and loved — and brands Tillo had worked with in the past. It was odd, but I didn’t give it a second thought.
Until I kept scrolling. Several of the Gen Z It Girls posted about MCo as well. They were paid partnerships. It piqued my interest: a new brand with presence at Coachella, getting some of the most followed creators to post about them? That’s a hefty price tag, given many brands are fighting for valuable content creator real estate at the festival. Brands are begging for an organic mention during weekend 1.
Mikayla Noguiera famously asked “how is this legal?” in her first video about the MCo, highlighting the obvious comparisons in names and packaging. Now, almost two years later, the Australian brand has gone from totally random to mainstream distribution in Target. The top bestsellers include dupes of Sol de Janeiro fragrance mists, rhode’s peptide lip treatment, Dior’s blush, Drunk Elephant Bronzing Drops, Estée Lauder’s Advanced Night Repair and NARS Creamy Concealer. The brand who has taken on the brunt of MCo’s dupes is Charlotte Tilbury. A few months ago, MCo even went after Sephora at a NYC pop up, copying their signature black and white stripes.
I interviewed Meridith Rojas, CMO of MCo and sister brand Nude by Nature. She’s unapologetic about what the brand represents, even as disapproval around its business model has grown louder.
“We’ve faced criticism that we’re just a dupe brand — that we don’t have a real community or brand, and that we’re trading off other companies’ equity,” Rojas tells me. “But when you look at the followers we’ve built, the sentiment, and the value exchange they get from following us, it is a community. And they know they’re following us — not the brands we dupe. There’s a distinction there.”
“Democratizing beauty” is a sentiment Rojas has mentioned in many interviews, including ours. She noted that both Mintel and Nielson2 have published different sets of data about how dupes and prestige grow together. “Consumers buying dupes are not the same shoppers, and both categories show strong dollar and buyer growth,” she says. “On face value, you might say, ‘They’re they’re taking money out of the pocket of of the brands that they’re duping,’ but the data proves otherwise.’”
Rojas respects innovation and compares price and accessbility as innovation, too. “I think if it wasn’t us, it would be somebody else, and we’re not the only ones doing it, and it’s been happening in other adjacent industries for decades,” she says. She mentions fashion brands like Zara and H&M, and even generic drugs, which has ties to MCo — their parent company, Vidacorp, makes generics, too.
“The generics business actually is looked at with a lot of like, respect, like, ‘Thank goodness somebody can come and offer people that need the medicine for now,” Rojas says. “When you talk about beauty, you don’t need it like you need medication, but there are people that just cannot get the name brand — should they be left out of those different formats or those formulas or those types of products? Should we just say drugstore makeup, or mass makeup should be inherently be less nice?”
Playing Nice With Other Brands
I asked Rojas if any founders had reached out to the brand about MCo’s business helping their own or if any have received a benefit from being duped by them. "I have talked to founders who we haven’t duped, but we’ve talked about doing things with people we respect — and not that we don’t respect the people that we’re directly duping — but imitation is the greatest form of flattery, right?”
She explained that by duping them, it’s a signal of success for that brand: they’ve hit mainstream popularity where a person wants a product they can’t afford. She didn’t say if any brands have reached out with positive feedback, but did note the unhappy founders. “I get that. I wouldn’t expect them to be like, ‘That’s great. Thank you,’ but at the same time, we are doing everything very intentionally and carefully through a legal lens, and we’re not trying to deceive the consumer. If certain people are annoyed with that, they should be annoyed maybe more with the law than with us, because we’re following it.’”
I should note many brands do not feel this type of duping is within MCo’s legal right: following our interview, Sol de Janeiro doubled down on their original claim from 2024, saying MCo’s fragrance mists are not only a copy of 8 of their own, but also intentionally marketed as a dupe of them to confuse the customer. (Given a majority of Sol’s fanbase are young impressionable women, they may have a point.) Sol also claims MCo has violated FTC endorsement guidelines (which The Fashion Law outlines). In 2021, prior to MCo entering the US, Tarte sued them allegeding their dupe of Shape Tape was too similar in packaging. The case was settled out of court and MCo changed the packaging. Australian brow and lash brand ChemCorp sued MCo the same year claiming infrigement, which was also settled.
Clearly, the brand has found a way to operate within the bounds of the law — for now. But it raises an inevitable question: whether there’s a reckoning ahead, one where MCo becomes the test case that finally forces the industry to draw a harder line.
It isn’t a stretch to assume MCo is likely a part of the reason why Charlotte Tilbury did press discussing her disdain for dupe culture. (e.l.f.’s Halo Glow was probably up there, too.3) I wanted to know the ethos or brand guidelines they abide by. Are there off-limit products for any reason or another?
“I think we’re pretty unafraid,” Rojas said. “We just had a pop-up that was inspired by a very popular prestige retailer. We don’t shy away from being extremely bold. We don’t feel like we have to put [brands] on an untouchable list. It’s really about what the community is asking for. What we do is have our internal checklist of, ‘Is this something that fits our mission?’ which is democratizing luxury. We’re not going to dupe a product that’s not a luxury or prestige or very expensive product, because that kind of defeats the whole purpose.”
There’s an irony in Rojas’s insistence that the brand is “unafraid,” even as she avoided naming any of the brands MCo routinely dupes during our conversation.4
Anyway, MCo doesn’t just dupe: they have an assortment of original products that Rojas says they brand doesn’t spend time marketing or talking about, which is a shame because several are great, like the solution-forward LipLights gloss, which includes a light for application and a mirror, or Extend Lash, the brand’s mascara that doesn’t look like another brand and sells every 20 seconds in Australia.
MCo does live by their bold claims for the most part, as they reached out to several brands in the last year to partner on a collaboration I’ve been told by several sources. When asked about these collabs and how MCo wants to move forward with working with brands they’re duping, Rojas said it’s a “win-win partnership” that helps bring luxury to everyone. “If there’s a brand that wants to work with us because they want to drive mass trial through our channels, that could be a great way to work together,” she says. “We’re not exclusively a white label brand, we’re not a private label brand, we’re a brand brand, and we’re privately held, so we can make a lot of interesting choices and decisions.”
Can Dupes Benefit the Brands They’re Copying?
This is a question I recently asked Jacquelyn De Jesu, a guest on Gloss Angeles. De Jesu created the Shhhowercap, a hydrophobic, anti-bacterial, specifically-designed cap meant to protect your hair. She sent a cease an desist to Kitsch, claiming the brand had infringed upon her design patent and trademark; Kitsch sued Shhhowercap and De Jesu arguing they did not. Ultimately, a jury did not find Kitsch infringed upon Shhhowercap’s patents or trademark.
Dupes are often lumped together with invention-driven products and protected IP, but De Jesu is careful to draw a line between the two.
“It’s really important that we don’t ladder up intellectual property infringement under the dupe umbrella,” De Jesu says, noting that she doesn’t believe dupes of genuinely inventive products are beneficial. “That’s a responsibility for buyers to understand, for media to be more mindful of, and for panels discussing the validity of dupes. Dupe culture in beauty is hugely popular — say a teal eyeshadow trend — but that’s not a counterfeit product. It’s not a patent-infringing product, or even something that could reasonably be accused as such.”
That distinction is precisely what some brands argue is being blurred. The issue isn’t always the absence of a patent; it’s the implied equivalence. With MCo, critics say the brand positions its products as effectively the same as their higher-priced counterparts — just cheaper — despite formulas that may differ and packaging that is often strikingly similar, if not an outright copy-and-paste.
I reached out to a few brand founders (some duped by MCo, some not yet at least) to get their takes on the brand as a whole: is there any upside to being duped?
“Personally, I don’t support what MCo represents,” one founder told me. “I know how much creativity, intention, testing and emotional investment goes into building a product and a brand. When a company’s entire model centers on copying — and often mocking — the work that founders pour their lives into, it feels dismissive of that artistry and effort.”
“I think it’s duplicitous to customers to try to recreate an existing product and pretend it is that product,” another longtime founder said. “From a business standpoint, they are stealing the intellectual and brand property. I think it’s okay to follow formulation trends, but don’t rip off the creativity and the brand equity that’s been cultivated, created and marketed by a brand.”
“The brand spent a lot of money to get that product to a premier position,” she continued. “MCo is riding the coattails of all of that work. They may say they are providing an ‘alternative to a customer who wouldn’t buy the original,’ but then they should just say it has similar performance to the original, but create a separate set of branding codes.”
