Perfumes: the Originals and Dupes Paradox

At some point, as I already mentioned in one of my previous articles, the perfume industry stopped selling scent and started selling identity.

The perfume market is simply too vast to fully grasp. Even within a single company, the number of brands and product lines can be staggering, and unless you are genuinely immersed in the industry, making sense of all the available options is not easy.

One brand can carry forty different fragrances, and beyond that, thousands of labels exist entirely outside commercial mainstreams, which is precisely where things get more interesting, and considerably more difficult.

Beyond personal interest in the market, there is a question that I have been asking myself more often lately: how far can this market actually go?

When fragrances are priced at three or four hundred dollars, how often are people really buying them, and for whom? This is not an everyday consumer product. Many of these brands market directly to individuals and build around the idea that everyone deserves to find a personal scent that somehow reflects who they are. Years ago, people often had a single “signature fragrance.” As far as I remember, my father´s green Polo bottle was restocked for decades. During my high school years, I recall Electric Youth with heart felt emotions in most teenage girls, and wearing CK Obsession and Escape as a luxury.  Today, the search feels different. It is less about loyalty and more about discovery — finding something that feels personal, distinctive, and increasingly difficult to replicate socially.

That is where the current market pressure comes in. A growing number of consumers are stepping away from traditional designer fragrances and moving toward niche perfumery. While luxury fragrance houses have existed for decades, the modern niche industry truly accelerated in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when consumers began searching for alternatives to heavily commercialized scents found in every department store. Perfume houses can be understood in three broad waves. The heritage luxury era, led by houses like Creed (1760) and Penhaligon's (1870), focused on traditional elegance, craftsmanship, and scents designed to signal refinement and social status. The artistic transition period, marked by Diptyque (1961) and later Frédéric Malle (2000), shifted perfumery toward storytelling and authorship, treating fragrance as an expressive art form rather than just a luxury accessory to the masses. Finally, the modern niche explosion, beginning in the mid-2000s with brands like Byredo and Le Labo (2006), followed by Xerjoff (2007), Maison Francis Kurkdjian (2009), and Initio Parfums Privés (2015), transformed perfume into a global identity-driven industry where scent became a form of personal branding, ranging from minimalist skin scents to highly opulent, high-performance compositions.

From personal experience, this pursuit can quickly become a hobby of its own. After buying a significant number of perfumes over time, you start noticing something interesting: not everything that is different is necessarily better. Some fragrances stand out precisely because they are unconventional, but that does not mean they are something you would actually wear regularly.

For me, I tend to gravitate toward warmer, tuberose, creamier, smoother fragrances rather than extremely sharp or overly sterile compositions. Scents like Dior Tobacolor, Memo Marfa, Byredo Vanilla Antique, Le Labo Santal 33, Matière Premiere Santal Australie, or even the slightly boozy warmth of Nasomatto Baraonda feel far more interesting to me than fragrances built primarily around freshness alone. They have texture, depth, and a certain softness that evolves naturally on skin. Even certain creations from Louis Vuitton, like Pacific Chill or Afternoon Swim, while exceptionally well executed, lean more into a brighter and cleaner direction that many people naturally prefer for everyday wear.

Others may prefer sweeter and more diffusive fragrances built around amber, saffron, praline, vanilla, or sugary woods, such as Baccarat Rouge 540, Initio Side Effect, Bond No.9  Tribeca,  Angels’ Share by Kilian, or some of the more modern gourmand-inspired releases currently dominating the market. Some gravitate toward cleaner or musky compositions and skin scents like Le Labo Another 13, or Diptyque Fleur de Peau, fragrances designed to feel intimate, understated, and almost transparent rather than loud. Others prefer darker profiles built around oud, leather, smoke, patchouli, incense, some even discomforting, with fragrances like Tom Ford Oud Wood, Frederic Malle The Moon, Amouage Interlude, or Orto Parisi Stercus sitting somewhere in that space.

That is part of what makes the industry so fascinating. Some people are drawn toward airy citrus, neroli, marine notes, and hyper-clean ambroxan-driven compositions, while others look for sandalwood, creamy fig, tea accords, musk, tobacco, soft spices, resinous woods, or fragrances that evolve almost like fabric warming on skin.

None of those preferences are objectively better. They simply reflect personality, mood, lifestyle, and sometimes even the image people want to project. Fragrance becomes less about hygiene or attractiveness, and more about identity and emotional connection.

One of the things I enjoy most about fragrances is how strongly they connect to memory and emotion. Almost every night, before my sons Simon and Luciano go to sleep, I spray two different fragrances for them to smell and compare. Sometimes one is creamy and warm, sometimes fresh, musky, smoky, citrusy, or sweet. What started almost as a small ritual became something they genuinely look forward to. They ask questions, react differently to each scent, and slowly begin developing their own perception of smell and preference.

It is interesting to watch because fragrance appreciation is not something most people are really taught. We learn music, food, art, and wine appreciation, but rarely scent. Yet smell is probably one of the senses most closely connected to emotion and memory. Over time, they have even started recognizing certain notes and styles on their own, which honestly makes the whole hobby even more enjoyable for me. Without smell, memories feel flatter, experiences become emotionally distant, and everyday life loses part of its texture.

For anyone entering this world, one surprisingly useful tool is. Beyond being a fragrance database, it has become a massive community where people compare perfumes, discuss similarities, analyze notes, and even debate reformulations or performance differences between batches. In many ways, it reflects exactly how deep and passionate this industry has become.

I like to compare it to craft beer. You walk into a place, try several options, enjoy some and not others, and sometimes leave without finding anything you would want to come back to, so you return to what you already know works. Not because it is objectively the best thing out there, but because it is reliable. Perfumes work in much the same way. You can explore endlessly, but eventually you return to the same few fragrances — the ones you reach for without even thinking twice.

The industry has grown to a point where saturation is almost unavoidable. Step into a duty-free store — Tocumen, Panama, for example — and you are immediately overwhelmed by every brand and every variation imaginable, with nowhere near enough time to meaningfully experience them all. After a while, everything starts blending together, your sense of smell wears out, and what was supposed to be an enjoyable experience becomes exhausting.

Within that same space, you also encounter more experimental compositions — fragrances that smell like aged wood, wet soil, smoke, raw resin, leather, old books, whiskey barrels, burning incense, or something you cannot even properly describe. It can be genuinely fascinating, but not always practical. And that brings the same question back around: how much of this actually makes commercial sense?

Eventually, anything that works gets replicated. Once a fragrance gains traction, similar versions begin to appear, often backed by companies with far greater marketing and distribution resources, capable of taking that original idea and scaling it to a much wider audience. What once felt unique slowly stops being so.

This is where the lawyer in me kicks in.

Scent is not something that can be easily protected. You can register a brand name, safeguard a bottle design, and defend a visual identity, but the fragrance itself is difficult to claim as exclusively yours. That is precisely why dupes exist and why they continue growing. You can walk into a store like Zara, ask for something that resembles a three-hundred-dollar fragrance, and most likely find an option for twenty. It will not be identical, and the branding will differ for obvious intellectual property reasons, but for most consumers it will be close enough.

So the real question becomes: where does the value actually lie? In the scent itself, or in everything surrounding it?

Because the experience genuinely differs. Buying a fragrance inside a luxury boutique with personalized attention is completely different from picking up an inspired version at a retail chain. Brands like Creed have built an entire world around their products, while others like Acqua di Parma go even further, offering custom blending experiences that make what you walk away with feel truly one of a kind.

Even so, there is a limit. The moment something becomes widely popular, it stops being exclusive, and with that shift it inevitably loses part of what made it feel special. Baccarat Rouge 540 is perhaps one of the clearest modern examples. What once felt distinctive eventually became so recognizable and replicated that entire segments of the market started smelling almost identical.

What makes perfumes so compelling is not just the scent itself, but everything behind it — the desire to stand out, the process of discovery, the constant tension between exclusivity and accessibility. It is a space where aspiration, practicality, and emotion all exist side by side.

And perhaps the most honest question of all is this: are we truly searching for a unique fragrance, or are we simply looking to feel like we have found one?

From a legal perspective, this is more relevant than it might initially seem. In intellectual property, value does not always sit where we instinctively expect it to. In the case of perfumes, the scent — which should logically be the most protected element — is generally not something the law covers on its own. What can be protected is everything around it: the brand, the name, the bottle design, the packaging, the overall identity. In other words, the experience.

This explains why dupes continue to grow without necessarily crossing clear legal boundaries. They are not copying a registered trademark or a protected design. They are recreating an olfactory experience that, in most cases, has no clearly defined legal barrier. When that is combined with strong distribution, aggressive social media marketing, and accessible pricing, the market responds on its own terms.

"Inspired by Anything" perfume: similar in appearance and scent but more accessible, set against a vibrant backdrop of pink tones and sparkling details.

That is where the conversation becomes interesting. If a scent cannot be exclusively owned, then real differentiation shifts toward brand building and the way consumers perceive the product — how the story is told, how it is presented, how the experience is delivered. It is no coincidence that the most recognized fragrance houses invest so heavily in exactly those elements.

This creates a serious challenge for niche brands. Once a fragrance gains meaningful popularity, larger players with broader commercial reach can reinterpret it more easily, and since the law does not always offer direct protection over the scent itself, the defense moves elsewhere.

In the end, the perfume industry offers a fascinating example of how intellectual property does not necessarily protect what seems most obvious, but rather what can be clearly and precisely defined. In a market where everyone is competing to stand out, that creates an interesting paradox:

The most valuable element is not always the most protectable.

SEBASTIAN JIMENEZ

Attorney at Law