Lunch-money dupe or half-a-paycheck original
Next, M&S and Zara are cloning Chanel and Tom Ford, and the press is applauding. Who actually wins?
The Independent ran two stories about cheap Chanel alternatives in a single week, and in both of them the dupe won. Next Eau Nude sat next to Coco Mademoiselle with the same citrus opening and the same rose heart, and split off only in the base: Chanel puts vetiver down there — that earthy root — Next puts vanilla. If it takes you hours to catch the difference, what exactly is the markup for? Try it yourself: smell both on skin, never on a paper strip.
Perfume dupes: what you can legally copy and what you can't
No patent and no copyright protects a smell: formulas are kept as trade secrets, and back in 2018 the EU's top court refused to treat the taste of a cheese as a creative work — scent runs on the same logic. A trademark covers only the name, the bottle and the logo, which is why M&S Studio can print “darkest vanilla” and let TikTok finish the sentence with Tom Ford Tobacco Vanille. The real gap is in the materials: instead of a natural absolute — the concentrate squeezed out of actual flowers — a clone usually runs on synthetics, so the opening matches and the base drops out sooner.
Copying a smell is legal. Copying the name isn't. Everything in between is a matter of conscience.
The original side has facts too, not just snobbery. Coco Mademoiselle was built by Jacques Polge in 2001, and Next Eau Nude turned up once the scent was already a bestseller: a clone walks into demand somebody else created, with none of the risk. When Page Six writes that the Salt & Stone Lily & Yuzu mist “smells like Dolce & Gabbana”, the media hands the clone the advertising the original spent years paying for. So vote: the dupe today, or save up for a bottle somebody actually dreamed up.