Tackling Beauty Lookalikes

Our friends at SnapDragon Monitoring recently wrote about the impact of counterfeiting and lookalikes on beauty brands.

I find the issue of lookalikes captivating as intellectual property enforcement can be quite tricky in those cases. Whilst counterfeit products very often integrate identical or confusingly similar word marks - they are "fake", non-authorised copies of the original goods - lookalikes instead mimic the product without claiming that they are the genuine article.

There are a lot of cases and discussions around supermarket lookalikes, but the problem is also affecting the cosmetics sector with an increasing number of "dupes" flooding the market. The difficulty is that there is clear consumer demand for such lookalike (and obviously cheaper) products. For example, I can see many social media "influencers" in the beauty space who actively look for, and share examples of, dupes to their online community.