The Dupe Economy: How Cost-of-Living Pressure Is Rewriting the Rules Between Brands and Consumers

44% of UK under-40s bought a dupe last year. Social media supercharges discovery, AI will accelerate it further, and luxury brands face an existential question: can they justify the premium?

The dupe economy is no longer a Gen Z curiosity — it is a structural shift in how consumer markets allocate value between brand owners and households. When 44% of UK 13- to 39-year-olds report buying a dupe in the past year, and 53% of that cohort say dupe quality makes them less likely to buy the original, this is not a fad. It is a repricing event.

The mechanism is straightforward. Social media — TikTok in particular, with 30 million UK monthly users — has collapsed the information asymmetry that luxury brands relied on. Where brand cachet once depended on controlled distribution and aspirational scarcity, a 60-second video comparing a £7 Aldi fragrance to a £130 Mugler bottle now reaches millions. The hashtag #perfumedupe has over 50,000 TikTok videos. The gatekeeping function of retail curation is gone. Retailers have noticed. US dupe retailer Quince has launched in the UK, explicitly listing savings against named premium brands on every product page — a £50 cashmere jumper shown next to Cos and Reiss equivalents at three times the price. Budget supermarket Aldi has become a de facto fragrance house in TikTok culture, with its £7 Lacura line tipped as substitutes for Paradoxe, Flowerbomb, and Baccarat Rouge. NielsenIQ data shows 38% of UK consumers switched to lower-priced brands in the past 12 months. The cost-of-living crisis is the accelerant, but AI may be the structural lock-in. As NielsenIQ's Eric Mills notes, consumers can increasingly ask a chatbot for a cheaper alternative to any luxury product — removing even the discovery friction that once protected premium pricing. Online dupe fragrance purchases are already up 17% year-over-year, outpacing the broader market. Luxury brands are not passive. Charlotte Tilbury — whose £350m fortune stems from her eponymous beauty empire, now owned by Spanish group Puig — won a 2019 copyright case against Aldi over packaging imitation. Trade mark specialist Claire Breheny argues brand owners must protect packaging and get-up, not just names. But legal action addresses copying, not competition. A product that smells similar but looks different occupies a legal grey zone that is very hard to close. The core tension is this: dupes do not claim to be the original. They claim to deliver a comparable experience at a fraction of the cost. Charlotte Tilbury's retort — "when you dupe, you dupe the consumer" — frames quality as the differentiator. But that argument only holds if consumers consistently perceive and value the quality gap. When 53% of young buyers say dupes make them less likely to buy the real thing, the perception gap is narrowing faster than brands can defend it. Millennials, not Gen Z, account for the greatest proportion of dupe sales — a detail that undermines the narrative of youthful frivolity. Savvy Marketing's research shows nearly 80% of shoppers are happy to spend more selectively where they think quality justifies it. The market is not rejecting luxury wholesale. It is demanding that every premium prove itself, product by product, purchase by purchase. That is a harder world for brands built on halo pricing and aspirational marketing.