Dupe Culture Is Booming on TikTok – but Beauty Brands Are Starting to Fight Back in Court
Main image – Madeline Liu
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Every few weeks, another “dupe” video does the rounds: a £6 serum sitting next to its £40 inspiration, the caption doing all the work an ad campaign used to.
Dupe culture has become one of the defining forces in beauty right now, and brands have increasingly started taking notice. Over the past two years, some of the biggest names in the industry have started taking their “dupes” to court- and the cases are testing a question beauty fans have been arguing about for years: where does inspiration actually end and infringement begin?
What a beauty brand can and can’t actually own
Before getting into the lawsuits, it helps to know what’s genuinely protectable, because it’s not what most people assume. A formula can sometimes be protected through patents or as a trade secret, although copying an ingredient list isn’t necessarily illegal on its own. What brands may also be able to protect is different: the name, the packaging and the distinctive look of the bottle or compact.
That’s where trademark and trade dress can come in, while specific marketing claims can raise separate legal issues, and it’s exactly where these recent cases have been fought.
Trade dress specifically covers the overall visual impression a product creates- shape, colour scheme, label layout, the combination of choices that makes someone recognise a bottle from across a shop floor without reading the name. It’s a genuinely fuzzy standard by design, which is exactly why so many of these cases end up being argued in court rather than settled by a quick look at the label.
Two brands can disagree entirely, in good faith, about whether a pastel-pink bottle with a particular cap shape counts as distinctive or just… what bottles in that category tend to look like.
The mascara case that tested the line
The clearest recent example is Benefit Cosmetics against e.l.f. Cosmetics, over e.l.f.’s “Lash ‘N Roll” mascara- a product that went viral specifically for being a dupe of Benefit’s Roller Lash. Benefit’s 2023 lawsuit alleged trademark infringement, trade dress infringement, and unfair competition, arguing the tube design and name were close enough to confuse shoppers into thinking the two products came from the same company.
The case went to a bench trial in August 2024, and the ruling landed in e.l.f.’s favour in December 2024- a federal judge found no infringement of Benefit’s trademarks or trade dress. The lesson wasn’t that dupes are automatically fine. It was narrower and more useful than that: taking inspiration from a popular product isn’t the same thing as infringing it, and a court will look specifically at the name, the packaging, and the overall look, not just the fact that two products do the same job in a similar way.
The fragrance mist fight that’s still going
Not every case has landed the same way, and the industry’s most closely watched dupe dispute right now is still unresolved. Sol de Janeiro filed suit against Australian brand MCoBeauty in late 2024 over MCoBeauty’s fragrance mists, which Sol de Janeiro alleges copy the packaging, colour palette, and branding of its hugely popular Cheirosa body mist line.
The lawsuit goes further than most dupe cases, also targeting MCoBeauty’s marketing language- specifically claims that the mists “smell exactly like” the originals- as potentially false advertising, not just a trade dress issue.
MCoBeauty has pushed back hard, arguing in its own filings that the packaging and colour choices are generic across the fragrance-mist category and not something any one brand can lock up. That’s the argument running through nearly every one of these cases: is a pastel bottle with a certain shape actually distinctive enough to belong to one brand, or is it just what mist bottles in that space tend to look like?
The case is still working its way through court, and however it lands could influence how other brands approach their own dupe disputes.
It’s not an isolated fight, either. Glow Recipe filed a similar suit against MCoBeauty in mid-2025, alleging that MCoBeauty’s Hydrate & Glow Ultra-Dew Serum copied the look and feel of its own bestselling Watermelon Glow Niacinamide Dew Drops- a product that’s been one of the brand’s most recognisable launches since 2020.
Two lawsuits against the same company, filed by two different skincare brands, within a year of each other, says something about how central packaging and branding have become to how beauty companies now think about protecting a hit product.
Why some dupes get sued and others don’t
Put the cases side by side and a pattern starts to show. E.l.f. won partly because a court decided the mascara’s actual name and packaging weren’t close enough to Benefit’s to confuse anyone- the similarity was mostly in the marketing conversation happening online, not the products themselves in the eyes of the law. Sol de Janeiro’s case is still alive partly because it isn’t only about how similar the bottles look- it’s also about specific marketing language that arguably makes a direct, checkable claim.
That distinction matters more than it might seem for anyone building a beauty brand rather than just buying from one. In the recent cases discussed here, the legal disputes have centred much more on branding, packaging and marketing than on the formulas themselves.
The packaging that looks unmistakably like someone else’s, or a marketing line that promises the exact same result as a specific competitor, is where brands tend to actually get sued.
What this means if you’re the one launching the brand, not just buying from it
For the growing number of indie founders in this space– and beauty audiences increasingly follow those launches as closely as the big brands’- confidential formulas can sometimes be protected as trade secrets, with contracts playing an important role in keeping that information confidential. That’s a trade secret question long before it’s a trademark one, and it depends on having the right agreement in place with whoever’s actually making the product.
ConsumerShield offers legal documents and guides across business and consumer law, including general NDA and contractor-agreement resources that founders can explore when considering this kind of early-stage protection.
The line is still being drawn
Dupe culture isn’t going anywhere, and neither is the legal pushback against it- if anything, both are accelerating at the same time. What these cases are doing, one lawsuit at a time, is drawing an actual legal line through a conversation that’s mostly happened on TikTok until now: taking inspiration from an existing product does not automatically amount to infringement, while copying legally protected branding or other distinctive features can carry greater legal risk.
The next time a dupe goes viral, the caption might not be the only thing doing the work- there’s a decent chance a legal team is watching too, quietly building a file of screenshots for a lawsuit that might not surface for another year.
This article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice.
