A pot of Charlotte Tilbury’s Magic Cream is £79. That’s the cost of a food shop, a chunk of an energy bill, money that, right now, has to cover a lot more before it even gets near your skincare routine.
Food prices, energy costs and mortgage payments are all up. Managing a household budget right now is hard enough without also trying to make room for the skincare and makeup that make you feel like yourself. So when women started reaching for cheaper alternatives to their favourite premium products, it’s not something a wealthy brand owner should be judging them for.
“When you dupe, you dupe the consumer”
That’s the line Charlotte Tilbury gave BBC News when asked about the dupe boom, dismissing anyone who goes for the cheaper option as settling for something that “won’t perform the same.” Fine sentiment if you’ve never had to think twice about £79. Less convincing when the clip picked up 2.3 million views and the top comment on YouTube reflected the sentiment of a lot of women in the UK “Women can’t afford premium prices right now”.
One comment put it even more bluntly: “because I need to justify inflating the price of my product purely so it can remain just slightly out of reach for those who aren’t well off.”
She’s not wrong that a £15 alternative isn’t the exact same formula, what she is wrong about is why people are turning to it. It’s just that we’ve done the maths on rent, food and bills, and decided that isn’t where that money is going this month. The whole debacle had a slightly “let them eat Magic Cream” energy, like reaching for a cheaper option is a lapse in taste rather than a completely sane response to managing the cost of everything.
Back in 2019, Tilbury sued Aldi over a lookalike bronzer palette and ran a whole campaign in 2025 called “Legendary. For a Reason” aimed directly at copycats. But telling people a £15 alternative “won’t perform the same” misses the actual question, which is why the price is what it is in the first place?
As one commenter pointed out, “dupes are the penalty to brands that refuse to take the time to truly innovate. If a formula has a patent, it can’t be duped… if not, and you want to charge people huge amounts of money, then the brand has no ground to stand on.”
Enter Beauty Pie, who are making a very good point
While Charlotte is busy being unimpressed with us, Beauty Pie founder Marcia Kilgore has spent years proving her point wrong. Their whole model is built on sourcing from the same luxury labs that supply the big names in France, Korea, Italy, Germany, the UK, and the US, then stripping out everything that has nothing to do with what’s actually in the tub: the campaigns, the celebrity faces, the beauty counters. What’s left gets sold a lot closer to what it actually costs to make.
It’s not just us saying this either. One commenter, a working makeup artist of 25 years, said: “a lot of these dupes in fact do perform just as well as the originals… for a fraction of the cost and with the cruelty-free accreditations.”
Check out Katsaves share her tried and tested dupes here.
We’re not saying Charlotte Tilbury is out here ripping anyone off, but across the industry, it’s known that luxury cosmetics are marked up ten times their production cost, sometimes more. This isn’t a scandal, it’s just where a fair chunk of that price really goes, not into the cream but into everything else sitting around it.
Is buying the £15 version really so bad?
As one commenter said, “normal earning people cannot afford spending £50 for a lipstick they can get for £5. Sorry not sorry.”
In our opinion? Absolutely not. If you’re standing in Boots doing mental maths between the Charlotte Tilbury jar and the dupe, go for the one you can actually afford. That’s you already dealing with every other bill that’s crept up this year and making a sensible call with what’s left. This is our call to Charlotte to read the room a little.
If you want to make room in your budget for highly coveted beauty items, create your very own beauty sinking fund in the Financielle sinking fund tracker for free here.