In the beauty and cosmetics industry, where product quality and trust are paramount, counterfeit products and fake social media accounts pose significant challenges for brands. As well as tarnishing your brand’s reputation and incurring financial losses, they can also cause major risks to consumers.
Fake Beauty Products & The Threat to Consumers
Counterfeit and lookalike products (also known as “dupes”) are flooding the market, with the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) estimating that 4.8% of cosmetic sales in Europe last year were of counterfeit origin. This adds up to losses for brands of €3 billion annually.
At first glance counterfeit cosmetics appear to be genuine products, but they often contain harmful ingredients or are made in non-sterile illegal laboratories. It’s unlikely that they follow the industry’s rigorous safety standards, meaning higher risk of allergic reactions.
These fakes not only undermine trust in established brands and their authentic products, but can cause serious health risks to unsuspecting customers, leading to reputational damage that is difficult to repair. Some popular brands that have been targeted by counterfeiters include:
- MAC Cosmetics has frequently been targeted, with fake lipsticks and foundations being sold on e-commerce platforms.
- Kylie Cosmetics faced counterfeit replicas of its lip kits containing hazardous chemicals, leading to health complaints from unsuspecting buyers.
- L’Oréal has battled counterfeit skincare products that undermine its brand image and customer trust.
Counterfeiting poses serious challenges to beauty brands, emphasizing the need for robust enforcement of intellectual property rights, consumer education, and innovative authentication technologies.
Read our deep dive into counterfeiting and lookalikes in beauty.
The rise of mimicry on social media
Social media platforms are fertile ground for fake accounts promoting counterfeit products. With the rise of AI, it’s even easier to copy brand logos and other assets, as well as creating ‘deep fake’ imagery to make cheaper alternatives look like authentic products.
As well as selling fake beauty products, these profiles can be used for ‘phishing’: stealing customers’ personal information like passwords and credit card details.
When accounts imitate official brand profiles, it can mislead consumers and erode confidence. For beauty brands, this is a dual threat. Not only are they losing direct sales to counterfeiters, they must also grapple with the reputational fallout of customer complaints about poor-quality knock-offs.
Real Impact: Crazy Color
Crazy Color, a well-known beauty brand, faced these exact challenges. Counterfeiters threatened their vibrant reputation by selling low-quality products on online marketplaces while mimicking their intellectual property such as package design. By partnering with SnapDragon, Crazy Color was able to implement robust monitoring and enforcement strategies. These efforts not only safeguarded their brand’s true colours, but also rebuilt consumer trust.
"SnapDragon's software is exceptional at detecting trademark infringements, and their expert team efficiently takes them down, ensuring our consumers access only authentic Crazy Color products, safeguarding our revenue and reputation."
How SnapDragon Brand Protection Software Can Help
With fakes becoming more common, it’s important to have an online brand protection strategy in place. One of the most accurate ways to do this is to partner with SnapDragon.
Using a combination of advanced brand protection technology and an expert team, SnapDragon can help those in the beauty and cosmetic sector identify and remove fake products before it becomes a major issue.
As your brand protection partner specialists, SnapDragon can:
- Use image recognition to find counterfeit products across online social media, marketplaces and other ecommerce channels.
- Monitor social media platforms for fake profiles and impostor accounts.
- Protect customer trust by ensuring only authentic, safe products reach consumers.
- Take swift enforcement action to remove infringing listings and profiles, including filing takedown requests on online platforms to remove counterfeit listings.
By addressing these threats head-on, beauty brands can secure their reputation, safeguard customer health, and maintain the authenticity that defines their success.
