The Right to Buy
Trendiness is not a human right.
We’re coming up on the end of 2023, which means I’m reflecting on the work I’ve published this year. One of those pieces that sticks with me is this feature I wrote for Allure on the rise of perfume dupe brands like Dossier and Oakcha whose entire m.o. revolves around explicitly selling cheaper copycats of high-end perfumes. Right now, for example, Dossier is promoting its new Citrus Matcha, a $39 perfume “inspired by” Le Labo’s Thé Matcha 26, an equivalent size of which retails for $230.
Oftentimes with reported features, there are many ideas and threads that remain on the cutting room floor simply because, while interesting to me, they get in the way of telling a cohesive and succint story. This one is no different. And the point that stays with me that I didn’t manage to fully weave into the Allure article is the way many of these dupe brands position their lower-priced copies as a sort of moral good.
“Dossier was founded out of a desire to make premium fragrances accessible to everyone… It’s time to say goodbye to feeling lost or left behind when it comes to experiencing premium fragrance,” reads Dossier’s about page. “We believe that everyone should be able to have a collection of favorite fragrances without breaking the bank,” says Oakcha. “Access to premium fragrances shouldn’t be a privilege for just the 1%, but the norm for all,” Dossier goes on to say in its brand values.
At a glance all of this sounds nice. Who can be against making a nice product more accessible? But let’s be honest about what we’re talking about here. This isn’t housing, or education, or health care. It’s perfume, a luxury product in every sense of the word in that it is not only expensive, it is entirely unnecessary to your ability to live. Much as it might soothe our consumer-minded conscious to say otherwise, you are not entitled to own a collection of fragrances. And while it might feel good to align ourselves with the downtrodden 99% by hitting “add to cart,” the “1%” are not people buying $200, $300 or even $400 perfume bottles, but people who fly in private jets. I realize $400 is a lot of money to spend on a perfume, but there is a difference of magnitude here.
Now to be clear I’m not saying that wanting to own more than one fragrance is bad or unjust. I personally love perfume and wear it just about it everyday (not to mention the fact that writing about this industry pays my bills). Nor do I want to imply that the high-end brands getting copied by the dupe brands are the ones interested in your wellbeing. They care about their right to sell you perfume and turn a profit, just like the dupe brands.
But this type of feel-good, “everyone deserves premium fragrance” language and positioning is successful because of the way that inclusivity and accessibility have overtaken exclusivity as the ultimate luxury, at least on the marketing level. It’s also reflective of how we’ve come to view Buying a Bunch of Stuff as our god-given right and trendiness as some kind of moral issue.
Take the Depop Landlord discourse of 2023. “People who go to thrift stores, find amazing shit like this, and then sell it on depop for 4x the price are the landlords of this generation,” read a viral tweet from earlier this year.
According to this poster, Depop sellers use their capital to take a commodity off the market and sell it back to you at an inflated rate, just like landlords. Sounds pleasingly inflammatory if you feel frustrated by your lack of cool clothing. But this logic only works if you confuse trendy clothing, a desire, with housing, an actual necessity. And it only works if you ignore the fact that, unlike housing, clothing is not in short supply whatsoever. There is actually too much clothing, causing significant harm and pollution around the world. And unlike many landlords, these Depop sellers actually do a significant amount of labor by sifting through thirft stores to find appealing pieces, merchandising and photographing them for sale online, and shipping them out to buyers.
But again, the emotional core of this tweet works on the same level as the Dossier marketing language. It plays on our desire to recast trendy products, be it clothing or fragrance, as not a want but a need. If we believe that trendiness is a need, then we are perfectly justified in our overconsumption. We’re entitled to buy five perfumes in one go instead of saving up for just one. We’re entitled to shop at fast fashion retailers like Shein because they make cool clothing “accessible” through low prices, even if those low prices only exist as a result of human rights abuses and labor violations.
This type of thinking is incredibly pervasive on social media platforms that value haul and collection videos. Lately I’ve come across the videos of TikToker DepressionDotGov, who sends up unnecesarry “garbage” shopping popular on the platform, like the Target hauls where shoppers fill their carts with seasonal decor that will probably collect dust in their homes for a few months before making their way to a thrift store.
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These offer a counter narrative to online behavior that glamorizes, or at least normalizes, hyper-overconsumption. Makeup and clothing are particularly susceptible to this kind of overconsumption, but you can sub any product category in here — even reusable Stanley water bottles apparently, which I’m somewhat perplexed by as owning a dozen reusable water bottles seems to defeat their original purpose of cutting down on additional plastic and resources. I mean, I guess if you want your home to feel like a sterile grocery store a la Khloé Kardashian, so be it. But I digress.
It can be frustrating, I realize, to feel like you are cut off from something that more privileged, wealthier people are able to purchase with abandon. If they can purchase fancy perfume, why shouldn’t I be able to? If they can buy the latest bag, why can’t I? But buying into this thinking doesn’t actually benefit you, it only benefits the companies making perfumes and purses, be they affordable or true luxury, who need you on a constant spending spree. Because the target is always moving, the trends will always change, and you’ll always need yet another perfume or another purse or another top or another reusable water bottle to keep up.
But go ahead, buy that extra perfume bottle if you so desire. Just remember that you don’t “deserve” it. You just want it.