Fragrance houses have been raising prices for years. A bottle that cost €150 five years ago is €220 today, and the jump from designer to niche is steeper still. At the top end, you're easily looking at €300 to €400 for something from Creed or Louis Vuitton. That's real money for most people.
So clones exist. And honestly? That makes complete sense.
If a house creates a fragrance that genuinely resonates with people, someone else is going to try to recreate that feeling at a fraction of the price. That's how markets work. The interesting part isn't whether clones exist, it's how people feel about them.
The tribal stuff is exhausting
Spend any time in fragrance communities online and you'll notice a pattern. On one side, some OG owners get weirdly defensive, as if someone else wearing a similar scent somehow devalues their bottle. On the other side, certain clone communities have their own version of the same energy, just inverted: a sort of chest-puffing pride in having "beaten the system," where dunking on the OG seems to matter more than actually enjoying the fragrance.
Neither of these is a particularly good use of anyone's time. The "your €300 smells exactly like my €30 and you're mad about it" attitude is just the same status game played with different props. It probably says more about where we are as a society right now than it does about fragrance.
For what it's worth, we haven't noticed OG owners being all that upset. Most fragrance enthusiasts seem fairly relaxed about the whole thing.
Our actual take
We stock a handful of clones alongside their originals, and we have discovery kits built around exactly this comparison. We'll share our own thoughts on individual pairs over time, since we're testing these properly and have something real to say about them.
But the short version is this: a good clone is just a good fragrance. We're not interested in picking a winner. If you smell great, you smell great. The bottle's provenance isn't what's hitting people's noses when you walk past them.
Not all clones are the same, though
Here's where we will draw a line: there's a meaningful difference between a house that genuinely works at recreating a scent profile with decent materials, and what appears to be a wave of brands essentially repackaging fragrance oils sourced wholesale, slapping an "inspired by" label on them, and calling it a product.
The latter has exploded in the last few years. The quality floor on those is very low, and the "inspired by" category risks getting a bad reputation it doesn't entirely deserve.
Because on the other side of that, you have houses doing serious work. Bujairami has been picking up traction recently for good reason. Alexandria Fragrances and Montagne Parfums get talked about fondly across Reddit threads not because they're cheap, but because they're genuinely good. And then there are the established Middle Eastern houses who largely built their identity this way, even if they didn't always market it in those terms. Those aren't in the same conversation as mystery oils in a nice bottle.
We carry a few Bujairami fragrances and plan to expand on them. And if you want to put a clone head-to-head with its original, our Discovery Kits have you covered.
So the distinction we care about isn't OG vs clone. It's good fragrance vs not. The price tag, and where it sits in relation to whatever inspired it, is secondary.
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