Beauty’s Gray Area: What’s The Line Between Dupes, Benchmarking And Reverse Engineering?

While dupes have dominated beauty industry conversation recently, two common behind-the-scenes practices—benchmarking and reverse engineering—often raise similar questions around imitation and originality. To understand the distinctions between these practices, for the latest edition of our ongoing series posing questions relevant to indie beauty, we asked 14 consultants, product developers, cosmetic chemists and founders the following:

Where do you draw the line between benchmarking, reverse engineering and outright copying? Are there any requests you won’t take on? How often are you asked to recreate existing products? Are there or should there be industry best practices around these processes? What should consumers understand about how these activities differ from dupe culture?

Lipika Hegde Head of Product Development and Innovation, Gorgeous Nothings and Vanity Country Club

Benchmarking and reverse engineering are standard tools in the product development world, but for me, they’re inspiration starting points and not end goals. I may take inspiration from a texture, sensorial profile or format, but I don’t recreate products. My approach is to reinterpret, often combining elements from different benchmark references while building a distinct formula with its own performance, claims, and identity.

Ingredient strategy plays a key role here. We are usually working with different actives, technologies, or positioning, which naturally shifts the texture, end performance and claims. More importantly, the product story and purpose should always be authentic to the brand. Every brand is solving for a different consumer need, and that should come through clearly in the formulation and the ingredients we choose.

We don’t take on projects that aim to be exact replicas. Beyond the ethical aspect, it’s not where I add value. My strength lies in innovation and differentiation.

There’s no real industry-wide enforcement around this. Ultimately, the market is consumer-driven. Consumers are choosing their preferences with their dollars. If dupes are succeeding, it signals either demand for accessibility or a gap in the market that a brand can solve for. That said, there’s a difference between creating an accessible alternative and copying outright.

From a consumer standpoint, it’s important to look beyond surface-level similarity. Formula quality, testing, safety and the credibility of how a product is developed are what truly define its value, not just how closely it resembles something else.

And if a product performs well at a lower price point, its advantage is accessibility, which can be seen as a form of innovation. At the same time, for consumers who value authenticity and intent, there’s equal merit in choosing brands whose values they align with.

ANGELLA SPRAUVE Cosmetic Chemist and Clean Beauty Product Developer

Benchmarking is something I actually encourage during the briefing stage because formulators do need reference points. However, benchmarking should not mean copying. I like clients to think more critically about individual product attributes rather than recreating a single product outright.

For example, they may love one product for its texture, another for opacity, another for scent profile and another for finish or wear. That approach encourages innovation instead of duplication and helps create products that feel more unique and intentional.

Reverse engineering is where I become much more careful. I’ll analyze a product to understand its structure, positioning and ingredient approach, but I personally draw the line at directly copying an INCI list or attempting to replicate a formula ingredient-for-ingredient. Even when two formulas appear similar on paper, there are still major differences in raw material quality, processing methods, stability, sensorial experience and overall performance.

What I’m seeing more frequently now is clients using AI tools to generate “copycat” formulas based on existing products. They’ll come in with auto-generated INCIs and suggested percentages and ask for an exact replica. That’s where I draw a firm line. AI can be a useful educational or brainstorming tool, but it shouldn’t replace formulation expertise, safety evaluation, stability testing or originality.

I think products on the market should be used as inspiration rather than templates for direct copying. Dupe culture has always existed to some extent, but consumers should understand that formulas are more nuanced than simply matching an ingredient list. Two products can look very similar online while performing very differently in real life.

The strongest brands ultimately succeed when they bring something distinctive to the table, whether that’s innovation, texture, efficacy, ingredient philosophy or overall experience.

THERESA PLAVOUKOS Founder, Plavoukos Beauty Consulting and Fat Mermaid Liquid Marine Collagen

When it comes to benchmarking or reverse engineering, I have been asked by clients to do both, and in most cases it’s by bigger, more established brands. The one job I did refuse was to reverse engineer an entire product line under a new brand with a similar name. There would have been no innovation or creativity involved.

As it relates to industry best practices for recreating products, so many great formulas are actually developed by improving upon existing ones, so I do not think benchmarking is a negative. But I have found that with indie brands who are generally more entrepreneurial, they want to create something new and ownable.

The strongest formulas that resonate in-market have a unique key ingredient, at an active level, that delivers on the promise of the brand’s positioning. Consumers should understand that the origin of formulas comes from multiple places: iterations of current successful formulas, fully replicated formulas of current products or in many cases completely original formulas that feature newly developed active ingredients designed to address specific pain points. The highly interested consumer can use AI to compare ingredient lists and levels to learn which formulas are “inspired” versus unique. In the end, they will stick with the formulas that perform over time.

The way I approach product/formula development is determined almost entirely on the stage the brand is in when they engage with me. I have developed full product lines for brands who had only a registered trademark and a general concept. I have developed products for clients who wanted to enter the marketplace through a certain category, e.g. luxury facial care, but had no idea where to start.

I typically conduct a thorough competitive analysis that includes full ingredient lists, including actives, and purchase all key competition to assess formula aesthetics and overall performance. At that point I will create a list of benchmarks for all aspects of the future formula: slip, tack, dry-down, evacuation, etc. There may be a different benchmark for each aesthetic, and these will be included in the product brief.

Clients have provided their input on favorites and, in some cases, I’ve taken clients to Sephora for a “field trip” so they can learn what they truly like and don’t like. In the end, the most successful new products and formulas for indie brands: 1) occupy a new white space, 2) have a unique formula built around an ownable active ingredient that delivers on the brand promise, and 3) are supported by initial product market testing, even if it’s only a small group of trusted friends. I do not feel it is necessary to dupe existing products to have success with today’s well researched beauty consumer.

JOE SCHRANK Founder, The Cosmetic Manufacturer

Benchmarking has been incredibly relevant in this industry for quite some time now. Dupe culture just gave brands the green light for low-hanging fruit, offering a shortcut. Almost every brief we see mentions a benchmark: "We want a shampoo like Olaplex No 8," "We want the feel of K18." That's just product development.

Chemists use different testing and methods to understand a target, then build something functionally similar with their own IP. The line gets crossed when "inspired by" turns into "indistinguishable from," especially when patents are involved. The C E Ferulic patent expired in March and the scramble to recreate it right now is a great example of how this stuff actually plays out.

The briefs we won't take on are the ones where it's basically "make this exact product, change the label." There's a real difference between "we love how K18 feels, can we get to 80% of that with our own actives and change a few things in terms of texture?" and "we want people to mistake our product for K18." First one is normal. Second one is a lawsuit waiting in your mailbox.

Lashify just won $30.5 million from a Chinese copycat, and Sahara Lotti has said she's spent $50 million enforcing her patents. That's where this is going. We probably see benchmark requests on 80% to 90% of new briefs, but it's usually used as inspiration and a combination of products. Pure copy requests are rarer, but they happen, and any manufacturer worth working with should say no.

There are levels to this, and that's where the conversation usually gets flattened. On one end, you've got brands building something genuinely new in a category a leader happens to dominate. That's just competition.

In the middle, you've got brands taking inspiration from a product they admire and actually trying to improve on it, swap in better actives, hit a different price point or build a cleaner version. That's how most of the industry has always moved forward.

The problem is the third bucket: brands whose entire strategy is to get as close as legally possible to someone else's product without adding anything of their own. No new thinking, no improvement, just a faster, cheaper copy riding on someone else's R&D and marketing spend. That's the version of dupe culture that actually hurts the industry because it punishes the brands doing the hard work of innovating and rewards those who wait for someone else to take the risk.

 All this being said, we are seeing innovation as the focus for most brands, and people are sick of seeing the same old formulas, packaging, and ingredients. Luckily, there are some amazing innovations coming forward right now.

TRICELLE GRAY Founder, Formuley

I draw the line at deception, confidential information and protected methods, not at reading an INCI list. Benchmarking and reverse engineering are normal parts of cosmetic chemistry, and nearly every product brief starts with three to five target products. Reading an ingredient list and inferring the architecture of a formula is not fringe behavior, but rather where formulation work often starts.

I would not frame this as people asking to copy products. In formulation work, benchmarking is constant, and brands and chemists look at target products to understand texture, claims, ingredient architecture, price positioning and category expectations. That is why Formuley includes an INCI deformulator that lets you paste a public ingredient list and receive an estimated draft with percentage ranges, phase assignments and regulatory flags. It is a starting point for analysis, not a claim to recover the original formula.

The legal lines are clearer than the ethical theater around dupes makes them sound. The real questions are whether someone breached an NDA or manufacturer confidentiality, whether they infringed a protected patent or method and whether they copied packaging, design or branding closely enough to mislead the buyer.

Olaplex shows why patents and confidential disclosure matter, Charlotte Tilbury's Aldi case shows why lookalike design can become a legal problem, and Estée Lauder's recent lawsuit against Walmart over alleged counterfeits is a reminder that counterfeits are a different category entirely.

The lines that should not be crossed include breaching an NDA or manufacturer confidentiality, reusing a formula developed under NDA for another brand, supporting trade-dress copying meant to mislead consumers about origin, and presenting a reverse-engineered estimate as if it were the original formula. The "recreate something like X" brief, in some form, is the rule rather than the exception, easily three out of four indie briefs.

 There are two things consumers should understand. First, a dupe is not automatically a counterfeit because a counterfeit lies about who made it while a dupe openly competes on price. Second, an ingredient list is not a formula because the same INCI from a different supplier, at a different grade, in a different emulsion is a different product.

Half of dupe culture collapses that distinction on TikTok and that is where the science gets sloppy. There should be better industry standards, but “don’t benchmark” is not one of them because it is unenforceable and dishonest.

The standard should be provability. Can the brand show version history, supplier documents, safety review, stability data, batch records and the decisions behind the product? If the answer is yes that is original work even if the INCI looks familiar. If the answer is no, the real problem is not benchmarking but that the work behind the product cannot be produced.

Julie Pefferman Cosmetic Chemist, Product Developer and Founder, Cosmeta

The beauty industry is incredibly competitive, and that pressure can lead some brands, especially those that are not strong in innovation, to become unclear on how to compete. That is where you start to see more reactive behavior rather than thoughtful development. It is also why investment in innovation is, and always will be, critical.

Where I personally draw the line is around intellectual property and originality. I am intentional about not lifting existing formulas, and I will not recreate formulas I have previously developed for a new client. That is one of the reasons I stopped advertising or publicly sharing the specific products I have helped bring to market. It was attracting the wrong type of requests, people looking to replicate rather than build something better.

A lot of IP issues in this industry are structural. Formulas often live with labs, not brands. Chemists move between labs, labs get acquired, and briefs can start to look very similar. Formulas do not work, and the lab calls in a chemist consultant to look at the formula issues. Under tight timelines, it can be tempting to reuse what already works. That is where IP leakage can happen, often unintentionally.

There is also a misconception that you can simply read an ingredient list and recreate a product. You can make educated guesses on structure and ranges, but replicating how something actually performs on skin is much more complex. A formula is not just an INCI list. A formula is a system. And, just as importantly, a formula is a procedure. The order of addition, shear, temperature curves, timing, and processing conditions all shape the final product.

You can give two chemists the exact same ingredient list and the same brief and still end up with very different outcomes. That is why true reverse engineering takes both technical skill and experience. It is also why AI formulation, based purely on reading an INCI list, has not truly arrived yet. There is a hands-on, sensory and performance evaluation component that cannot be fully read or interpreted from a label alone.

Technically, you can get very close to replicating a product, but it requires focused research, iteration and a deep understanding of the system. In many cases, that level of effort ends up being just as expensive as developing something new, if not more. That is why the idea that dupes are quick or easy is misleading. I can reverse engineer almost anything, but it takes time, and it is a power I personally wield carefully.

There are certainly labs that specialize in reverse engineering, and they can be very good at it. But when you build from that approach alone, you are often not creating a true long-term asset. You are recreating something that already exists rather than owning something differentiated.

In practice, one of the most common forms of benchmarking I see is not even competitive, it is internal. I have personally helped companies benchmark against their own products that exist within labs. This often happens when a smaller brand grows quickly and realizes they do not actually control or fully understand their original formula or have outgrown their lab’s performance capabilities. At that point, benchmarking becomes a tool for regaining ownership, improving performance or rebuilding something they can truly scale with.

Another brief I see a lot is, “make luxury product X but cheaper,” meaning they want the same performance but substitute in lower-cost ingredients. Sometimes those substitutions can be more sensitizing or less elegant in feel, which shows up in subtle ways that consumers pick up on in reviews. The goal in those cases is often to make sure the consumer does not notice, but those tradeoffs rarely go completely undetected. This is not something I do, but some labs take this approach to satisfy client demands and maintain business. This is also why I value chemist-led analysis of dupes because they often uncover details others miss.

Any brand that is getting knocked off usually has a real signal in the market. There is something consumers genuinely respond to. I see that as confirmation, not a threat. Of course, there are also international players copying products as well, but they will never have the same grasp on the American consumer or market nuance in the way domestic brands do.

That is why innovation matters even more. When you stay focused on building what is next, you can continue to outpace copies, regardless of where they come from. The advantage comes from focusing forward. If you are already building the next version, refining the system or creating a 2.0, you stay ahead while everything else falls behind.

That is why I personally prefer innovation, even if it is a small step forward. Chemists will always analyze what is already on the market. That is part of the job, but the goal should be to understand performance and then improve on it, not just reproduce it.

At a high level, advanced benchmarking is one of the most valuable tools a brand can use when it is done correctly. Not to copy, but to decode performance, identify what truly matters and then push beyond it. When paired with strong formulation and process control, it becomes a way to accelerate innovation rather than chase it.

Tips for benchmarking are to pull specific qualities from multiple products rather than focusing on one. For example, the performance of one product on dry skin, the delivery system of another and then improving the dry down or sensory. This creates best-in-class mashups without looking like any one product. Without benchmarks, the novice indie brand owner lacks a language to speak about product and can get lost in a development loop.

Even with iconic products, matching performance is far less predictable than people assume. Raw material variability, sourcing and proprietary processing all play a role. You cannot fully reduce a product to its individual parts and expect the same result. The formula is just one piece. There is sourcing, scale, testing, stability, regulatory work and brand investment behind every product.

LAURA LAM-PHAURE Fractional Technical Advisor and Cosmetic Chemist, Lam Phaure Beauty Group

Reverse engineering is inherently limited because you’re working with very little information beyond the ingredient list on the packaging. Even that can be difficult to interpret. Many materials share the same INCI name, but vary significantly in texture, sensory profile, grade, and performance depending on the supplier. At best, you’re making an informed estimation of how a formula was built, but it’s widely understood that you cannot achieve a true 100% match without access to the original formula and process.

Currently, I’m rarely asked to reverse engineer competitor products for new development. More often, brands come to me looking to re-engineer their own formulas because they’re unhappy with their current manufacturing partner, don’t own their IP and need to transition production elsewhere. In those cases, I’m always clear that the result will not be an exact match. There will be differences, even if we aim to get as close as possible in performance and aesthetics.

Whether reverse engineering is “good” or “bad” really comes down to intent. If the goal is to create a direct dupe and undercut the original product purely on price, that raises ethical concerns even if it’s not illegal. On the other hand, using reverse engineering to improve quality, ensure consistency, or regain control over your own product is a practical and, in many cases, justified approach.

It’s also important for consumers to understand that “dupe culture” is largely a marketing narrative. A lower-cost alternative doesn’t automatically mean a product is better or even equivalent in performance, quality or long-term reliability.

LAURA BADCOCK Cosmetic Formulator and COO, NourishUs Naturals

Inside a lab, those three things feel very different, even if they all get flattened into "dupe" on TikTok. Benchmarking is basically competitive homework. You buy the product, you live with it, you document texture, dry-down, wear, and it becomes a reference point when you write your brief. Reverse engineering is a technical exercise. You map the INCI, run analytical work (such as GC-MS, HPLC, etc.) and rebuild something that behaves similarly, but you’re still making decisions about materials, suppliers and tradeoffs.

Copying is when the brief says, “Make this indistinguishable,” so you aim for same texture, same shade, frighteningly close scent, sometimes even packaging and claim language designed to lean on the original equity.

For me, the ethical line is intent and added value. If we’re using a benchmark to understand the bar and then push to improve stability, sensorial, tolerability or price, that’s just healthy competition. If the goal is “ride this other brand’s R&D and brand story as cheaply as possible,” that’s where I say a hard no.

We were asked to “match” or “beat” existing products often. That’s just the reality of being a contract manufacturer. The red-flag asks sound like, “Can you clone this exact viral serum, including the fragrance, but cheaper so we can undercut them?” or “We want this same thing, same shade, same bottle, but with our logo.” At that point you’re not building a brand. You’re building a counterfeit with better lighting. I personally can’t stand by that.

When those briefs land, I usually push back and reframe. What do you actually like about this product? The finish? The way sensitive skin tolerates it? The price point? Once we know that, we can build something in the same competitive universe that’s legally and creatively yours, maybe a different sensorial angle, different actives, different positioning. That approach is slower than a straight copy, but it doesn’t put my team or the client on the wrong side of IP or retailer trust. Sadly, there have been clients who ask for it to be exactly the same even after I push back. We just will simply walk away. No duping/no reversing.

Right now, I think the industry is mostly operating on vibes and lawyer emails, which is not a great long-term strategy. I know some manufacturers might have no ethical qualms about reverse engineering. I can understand the need if a retail product’s manufacturer just simply closed their doors and reversing is the only option, but in the 20-plus years doing this, I have run across it once and didn’t end up reversing, but instead improved upon the product with using it as a benchmark instead.

I’d love to see clearer industry guidelines that separate legitimate benchmarking from deceptive dupe marketing, especially as retailers start giving dupes their own endcaps and as dupe fragrance brands move into the same aisles as the originals. Sensible basics would be something such as “don’t deliberately mimic trade dress,” “be precise in comparative claims,” and “don’t promise exact dupe if your formula and testing don’t support that” or better yet, just don’t promise to dupe at all.

With AI making high-fidelity matching easier, there also needs to be a human in the loop to ensure formulas stay compliant regionally and don’t blindly reproduce restricted ingredients or shaky claims. Otherwise, we’re going to see more fast dupe launches that look clever on TikTok and turn into regulatory headaches six months later.

From a consumer standpoint, dupe has become shorthand for “want it exactly like this, but cheaper,” and that can describe anything from loose inspiration to near counterfeit. Behind the scenes, benchmarking and reverse engineering are just tools. We use them to understand what’s working in the market and to figure out how to deliver similar or better outcomes at different price points, for different skin types or with different regulatory guardrails.

Two products that look like twins on TikTok can have very different preservative systems, potential allergens, stability profile and levels of testing, and those differences matter especially for leave-on actives and sensitive users. At the same time, I’ll admit dupe culture has been good for discipline. If your $80 product can be functionally matched at $18, you need to be crystal clear about what that extra $62 is paying for beyond a logo.

JADENE TAYLOR Founder, Cosmetic Scientist and Product Developer, Jadene Cosmetics

Benchmarking and reverse engineering have always been part of cosmetic product development as they’re essential tools. I don't believe they are shortcuts. In my experience, I’m rarely asked to directly recreate products. Most founders I work with come with a benchmark, but also a clear desire to improve it, whether that’s making it more suitable for a specific audience, replacing ingredients, improving stability or aligning it with their brand values.

Benchmarking, for me, is about understanding what consumers already love. If a product is performing well in the market, it tells you something important about texture, sensorial experience, or efficacy. But the goal is never to copy, it’s to interpret and improve. That could mean enhancing performance, refining the sensory profile or making more intentional ingredient choices.

Reverse engineering sits slightly differently. It’s more technical as you essentially analyze a formulation to understand how it works. But even then, it’s not about recreating something identically. In reality, that’s extremely difficult due to differences in raw material sourcing, processing methods, and supplier variations. At best, you can create something inspired, not identical.

Where I personally draw the line is at intent. If the goal is to create a product that performs well within a similar category, that’s valid product development. If the goal is to replicate something as closely as possible just to repackage it under another brand, that’s where it becomes problematic from both an ethical and innovation standpoint. In those situations, my role is to guide clients towards developing something inspired, but with its own identity and performance rather than a direct copy.

In terms of best practices, I think the industry already operates with certain safeguards such as NDAs, supplier agreements and intellectual property considerations. But beyond that, there’s also an ethical responsibility from formulators and brands to prioritize innovation and integrity rather than imitation.

KRUPA KOESTLINE Founder and Cosmetic Chemist, KKT Labs

Reverse engineering is part of the job. Every formulator does it to understand what's on the market and why something performs. The line for me is intent. Deconstructing a competitor to learn from the chemistry is research. Replicating it cheaper to ride someone else's brand equity is theft with extra steps, even when it's legal.

Clients ask me to "match" benchmark products constantly, and the conversation I have is always the same: we can study why it works, then build something better, more stable, more efficacious, more differentiated.

The industry won't self-regulate this. The IP protections are too thin and the incentives too strong, so the real accountability sits with consumers learning to read a formula. Dupe culture and reverse engineering aren't the same thing, but I guess dupe culture is what happens when reverse engineering loses its conscience.

Flavia Zhamo Founder and CEO, EC Studios

At EC Studios we don't reverse engineer products. Our job is to develop formulations with a value proposition unique to the brand we're building, which means starting from a consumer insight or a scientific opportunity, not from someone else's finished product.

Benchmarking is different, and it's necessary. Before we develop a new serum or lip balm, we evaluate what's leading the category by sensorial profile, finish and how the actives behave. That informs the brief. It does not become the formula.

The line for us is intent. "Build that texture around an active no one has commercialized yet" is benchmarking. "I want exactly this, just cheaper" is reverse engineering in service of a dupe, and we won't take it on. We regularly turn those projects down, and the requests have only increased in the last two years.

Outright dupes hold the industry back. They keep innovation locked in the past and devalue the formulation work behind the original. As a brand ourselves, Everyday Chemist, it is genuinely offensive to watch a company steal years of R&D work and repackage it as their own. That's where our values come from. A formula is intellectual labor. Copying it without adding anything new is plagiarism with a different SKU.

Loren Scott Founder, Health and Beauty Partners

These terms get used interchangeably, but they describe very different activities and the distinction matters.

Benchmarking is standard practice. When we’re developing a new product, our brief template almost always includes reference products from the market. That’s not about copying it. It’s about calibrating. If a client wants a lightweight moisturizer that absorbs quickly, pointing to a few benchmarks gives us a shared language for texture, skin feel and performance expectations. It’s a communication tool as much as a formulation one.

Reverse engineering is more nuanced, and honestly, the most common version of it we encounter isn’t what most people assume. Brands come to us wanting to reverse engineer their own products, usually to validate IP, audit a formula they inherited or understand what a previous CM actually made for them. That’s legitimate and often necessary work.

Where it gets more sensitive is when a client is asking us to recreate a competitor’s product. In those cases, we try to understand the underlying need. Usually what they want is a product that performs similarly for their consumer. We can address that through good formulation and the right benchmarks without producing a direct copy. That distinction matters to us, and we’re straightforward with clients about it.

There are requests we won’t take on. We won’t surrender fragrance information under any circumstances, and we actively direct brands to fragrance houses directly so they can develop something proprietary. Fragrance is often the signature of a product. Handing that over creates real IP risk for everyone involved. And we won’t produce direct knockoffs. This industry is too small and relationships matter too much. My reputation is worth more than any single project.

On industry best practices, informal norms exist, but formal standards don’t. Most experienced formulators and consultants operate by a version of what I’ve described, but there’s nothing codified. What that means practically is that the burden falls on the brand. Owning your IP, your formulas, your fragrance, your manufacturing process becomes even more important when there’s no formal framework protecting it. That’s not a reason to avoid the industry’s standard development processes, but it is a reason to be deliberate about what you control.

For consumers, the distinction from dupe culture is worth clarifying. Benchmarking and reverse engineering are development tools. Professionals use them to inform new formulations, not to replicate a finished product for retail. Dupe culture is a different conversation entirely, and frankly, it’s not one that comes up much on the professional side. In my experience, brands building serious products are thinking about differentiation, not imitation.

TAMAR KAMEN Beauty Industry Consultant, Fractional Executive and Product Developer

I won't outright copy other products and frankly I don't feel the need to. Innovation can mean combining existing elements in a new way. You can benchmark a texture, match a color from one product and select actives that appear in some formulas but not others. I find that approach completely ethical.

I haven't been asked to exactly replicate a product, but if I were, I'd turn it down. It's just not interesting to me. I am regularly asked to draw inspiration from certain aspects of existing products, and honestly that's helpful. Many founders don't have the technical vocabulary we do, so having them identify aspects of existing products they like helps create a clear, targeted brief.

I do think consumers understand this overlap even if they didn't know what to call it. They identify what they like and don't like using existing products as a reference point. Their ideal is often a combination of what several products each do partially. Those products aren't dupes; they are optimized innovations.

MIRIAM MANDEL Fractional Head of Product Development and Supply Chain

Reverse engineering is part of the job. Most brands come to you with a benchmark, something they love, something they hate, something they want to be inspired by. The benchmarks give context, helping the formulator understand the texture, the finish, the feel you're going for. You can't brief "make it feel luxurious" and expect someone to know what you mean.

Where I draw the line is exact duplication, taking someone's formula and reproducing it ingredient for ingredient. Someone put real work into developing that product and that deserves respect.

That said, let's be honest, the brand you're reverse engineering probably benchmarked someone else to get there. The beauty industry has always built on itself, the difference between inspiration and duplication is whether you're using something as a starting point or an endpoint.