March 15, 2024

Are Beauty Brands Focusing More on Dupes Versus Innovation?

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Dupes have always been an interesting part of the makeup and beauty world. Everyone has always been on the lookout for a dupe of their favorite product. In most cases, people seek out these dupes for various reasons, but one of the more important factors lately is the quest to find a cheaper version of a luxury product. It’s a stormy market lately and prices have crept up in the beauty world and everywhere else. Gas, groceries, and your favorite lipgloss have increased prices. But before we focus on what drives beauty brands to create dupes we probably need to focus on some of the original reasons the makeup community loved them so much.

I think a few years ago we were pretty overwhelmed with brands releasing a lot of mega palettes. Tarte, Too Faced, and others were pushing giant palettes that all had us squealing in joy but even before the mega palettes we had MAC Cosmetics releasing a collection every few weeks, and rather than indulge in all these different eyeshadows, lipglosses, and lipsticks we all wanted to know, “Do we already have a shade like this in our collection already?” This for me, was where the need for dupes arose and super early bloggers like Karla Sugar were out there swatching up their arm so we could figure out if we had the shade already.

Later on, when mega palettes began hitting the scene we most definitely started seeing more and more of the same shades being pushed and dupes again, became a pretty important part of our world as we tried to find if the shades in those new hot palettes were ones we had from that other mega-hot palette that launched the week before.

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March 15, 2024

Ulta Semi-Annual Beauty Event Sale Picks for Friday

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