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.
— Read more in Inside the sudden rise of perfume dupe labs at DazedDigital.
It’s sort of comical that the article suggests that duping fragrances is a new trend. “Sudden rise,” indeed. Designer Impostors was huge in the eighties (“If you like Halston you’ll love Hampton”), commercial perfumery has always had imitators (Cinnabar is a copy of Opium is a dupe of Youth-Dew is a replica of Tabu), and one of the central scenes in Parfum: The Story of a Murderer, set in late-1700s France, involves a perfumer desperately attempting to copy a successful scent, already an established, if frowned-upon, practice. There is nothing new under the sun, especially where money is involved.
I think there has been growth in the field since TikTok, but yes, these articles always act like everything is new under the sun 🙂