Across the UK, secret olfactory factories are at work. On unassuming industrial estates, these clandestine labs are busy creating copies of the most coveted fragrances. Workers in white coats squeeze pipettes of the latest perfumes into vast machines, revealing the specific blend of alcohols, oils and aromatic compounds that lie within. The ingredients are sourced and mixed together again. The result? A dupe perfume.

There’s a decent chance you will have seen these fake fragrances around; social media is filled with alluring ads offering cheap replicas of everything from Alien Goddess to Black Opium to, ironically, Replica. Dupe culture is booming and, like make-up remakes and substitute skincare, we’re warming up to the idea of these clone aromas. “I’ve been using dupe perfumes since I was 17. But I’ve been seeing all the adverts on Instagram and TikTok and it’s so much more of a thing now,” says culture and lifestyle reporter for The Independent Ellie Muir.

Even if you haven’t seen a dupe perfume, you definitely will have smelled one. It’s an industry on the ascent with a batch of start-ups making a fortune faking fragrances. The biggest are Noted Aromas, which hit £4m in its first year of business and The Essence Vault, which has sold a million bottles in the UK since 2019, plus there’s Eden Perfumes, which has a physical store in Notting Hill. Ironically, they have all spawned a range of smaller copycat competitors.

These fragrances are not the same as counterfeits. Unlike the dodgy, bootleg bottles you might find in Camden or Cheetham Hill filled with cyanide and piss, replicas are not pretending to be the real thing. Openly marked as “inspired by” fragrances, they don’t use the branding or packaging of the original perfume house but rather use, à la Aldi, labels that allude to the fragrance. They also don’t promise to smell exactly the same.

They do, though, get very close. It’s thanks to Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GCMS), an unsexily named method also used for food and drugs to identify the different molecules in a chemical sample. “They work by obtaining some of the liquid you are trying to replicate, even tiny amounts are sufficient,” explains David-Lev Jipa-Slivinschi, perfumer and founder of cult fragrance brand Toskovat. “It’s then analysed in a lab via a GCMS machine. This doesn’t give you the full ‘picture’ necessarily, but it gives you sufficient information that if you know how to interpret the results you can make something very, very, very similar,” he says.

Most copycat brands don’t promise perfume perfection, but instead claim around a 90 per cent match to the original scent, making them pretty much indistinguishable to the untrained nose. “Everyone always thinks I’m wearing Le Labo, but I’m not! I don’t lie, though. I tell everyone I buy dupe,” Muir says. Of course, the fake fragrance producers still have to procure the right ingredients to make it as similar as possible.

While some raw materials are genuinely hard to come by, however, most components aren’t as wildly expensive as you might think. Oud, after all, does grow on trees. “Even the originals, the big companies, use very cheap and readily available ingredients usually,” Jipa-Slivinschi says, offering an analogy. “It’s not as simple as a recipe, where a good heirloom tomato would clearly contribute to a better dish than a chemically-pumped supermarket tomato. In fragrance-making, it’s more like a painting. You can make a piece using cheap tools, old canvases and run-of-the-mill acrylics that’s as harmonious as one made with top-notch supplies,” he explains.

For the most part, then, it’s not the ingredients that make luxury fragrances so expensive. Instead, it’s the marketing (and mega mark-up) that creates such a high price tag. While, as expected, it’s all very hush-hush, noses in the know suggest the actual liquid itself could cost just one per cent of the overall price.

This plays into the hands of the perfume dupers, who can recreate the scents for mere cents and do away with the fancy campaigns. It’s why you can get, say, a replica Creed Aventus for just £19.99 through The Essence Vault compared to the £210 from Selfridges. “We keep our cost base down and achieve impressive economies of scale through using the same bottle and packaging across all our products. All of this allows us to keep our prices affordable without compromising on quality,” Connor Martin, founder of The Essence Vault, explains. This cut-price cost is, of course, what makes dupe perfumes so alluring to so many people. “We understand spending £200-plus on a fragrance is something that our customer just can’t do,” Martin says. Could they even be better than the real thing? “They’re almost identical and in some cases last longer on my skin for £20 a bottle, plus they refill bottles and are vegan,” Muir says.

Naturally, both luxury fragrance houses and smaller, independent brands are incensed by these cloned scents. “It is beyond any doubt plagiarism, and that would be a polite word. Of course it is upsetting,” says Jipa-Slivinschi. Could imitation be a form of flattery? “I don’t think there’s any compliment, as they simply copy everything, without exception, as long as they have clues it might sell,” he says.

There’s very little, though, that can be done and the copyright is murky. It’s essentially impossible to get a patent for a perfume’s essence. “There still doesn’t exist any form of intellectual property protection in this industry. You can trademark logos, bottle shapes and perfume names but the chemical formula is free for the taking,” Jilpa-Slivinschi says. Aside from a rare case involving Trésor in 2006, which saw the Dutch High Court rule that the smell of a perfume could be copyrightable, only fragrances of products that aren’t themselves fragrances (such as that doughy smell of Play-Doh) have been protected.

But while they can get away with it, is it toxic for the industry? For anyone who has ever created anything, it’s easy to understand the anger. Sure, you might not necessarily care about the plights of lined-pocket luxury perfumers; but there is something shady about copying original aromas that people have put blood, sweat and tears (or whatever else the GC-MS has picked up) into making.

But for their supporters, the dupes are a gateway aroma, actually encouraging people to buy the luxury fragrances rather than the opposite. “We help people find their new favourite fragrance before making that big item purchase,” Martin says. “I do look forward to the day that I can go into a woody Le Labo store and buy all the bits because I’m a massive fan,” Muir says. This switch relies on people wanting to move onto the real thing not because the quality of the product is much better; but simply because it is the real thing. Whether or not this holds, in our increasingly ersatz world – one where we smoke vapes not cigs, swap steak for fake beef and drink zero-alcohol hard seltzer – dupe perfumes are yet another tempting substitute.

With luxury still excluding most of us, it’s clear to see the appeal; but the copy-and-paste nature of these fragrances isn’t exactly something worth celebrating. For now, dupe perfumes will linger for years to come – and those secret olfactory factories will continue to operate around the clock, following the scent of every new fragrance.