Dupes—cheaper versions of expensive items that mostly look and feel the same—will always be a feature of the fashion industry. To be clear, these are not the illicit knockoffs of Prada and YSL handbags that made Canal Street famous––we’re talking legitimate imitation merchandise sold at Amazon Marketplace, Target, and even on the higher rungs of the fashion business. But dupes are especially ubiquitous in makeup, skincare, and fragrance, where the public is often seeking a more affordable alternative to whatever highlighter or perfume is trending at the moment. People, in other words, are asking for dupes, and brands are able to serve them up because of an increasingly de minimis barrier to entry when it comes to making beauty products and the quickening pace of product development. Social media has even turned the pursuit of a really good imitation product into a sort of competition, with virality and clout bestowed upon the discoverer. In fact, the sentiment toward dupes in beauty has largely bent positive since brands like e.l.f. Cosmetics, among others, are disrupting an industry in which most people can’t afford many of the most viral products. On Monday, two trade outlets took competing stands on the issue: Beauty Independent ran a positive piece about Target’s embrace of MCoBeauty, an Australian brand that will soon be selling a $15 knockoff of Charlotte Tilbury’s nearly $50 Hollywood Flawless Filter “down to the ridged gold cap.” (Among MCoBeauty’s other bestsellers are dupes of Dior lip oil and Drunk Elephant’s bronzing drops.) Meridith Rojas, MCoBeauty’s C.M.O., told Beauty Independent that she believes “accessibility is a form of innovation,” and that “the internet is making it so that we can innovate quickly. We can see what’s trending, we can see what people want, and we can give it to them at a price that they can afford. We’re democratizing luxury.” Over at The Business of Fashion, one of my favorite beauty writers, my pal Brennan Kilbane, wrote about the success of Charlotte Tilbury, which was acquired by Puig at a $1.2 billion valuation in 2020. The piece was pegged to the brand’s new dupe-fighting campaign, “Legendary. For a Reason,” in which Tilbury, herself, decries the copycats that make cheaper versions of her expensive products. She appears to be very distraught over the matter, and even goes so far as to say that the lower quality of the imitation version is a disservice to the customer: “When you dupe, you dupe the consumer.”