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Conspiracy theories are an understandably contentious topic these days, but if you’ll indulge me for just one moment, I’d like to introduce you to one of my own: I have long harbored a sincere personal belief that eye cream is fake.
Not fake in the sense that eye cream doesn’t exist. Tubs and tubes of the stuff line the shelves of drugstore skin-care aisles and brightly lit department-store beauty counters alike. Sephora’s website boasts 190 eye-cream or eye-treatment options; Ulta carries 192 creams alone. In that sense, eye cream is probably a little too real. The fakeness that I’m talking about is molecular. Eye creams make a lot of promises: They’ll tighten. They’ll brighten. They’ll de-puff and de-wrinkle and banish dark circles. They’ll accomplish this with science, or, more specifically, with the chemicals that many of them advertise in big print on their tiny packaging: retinol, vitamin C, caffeine, peptides, hyaluronic acid. They’ll also almost always be notably more expensive by volume than a regular facial moisturizer.
The problem is that no eye cream I’ve ever used has seemed to do anything more than whatever other cream I was already putting on the rest of my face. In my 20 years of adult life, I’ve never actually bought an eye cream, but I’ve tried out innumerable versions of the stuff: samples pitched into shopping bags and shipping boxes, free full-size products that sometimes seemed to arrive by the truckload at my door during my decade in fashion media, cast-offs swapped among friends and co-workers. I’ve used them all because, hey, I have them, and at worst, they’ll moisturize a part of my face that tends to get dry when left to its own devices. Maybe one of them will do something fantastic and I’ll have been wrong all along.
I haven’t been wrong yet. Instead, I’ve only grown more convinced that eye cream is just facial moisturizer in a smaller, more expensive tub. So, is it?
The short answer: “It depends,” says Perry Romanowski, a cosmetic chemist and a co-host of the podcast Beauty Brains, which delves into the science behind beauty products. That is, importantly, not a no. According to Romanowski, who spent 30 years in the beauty industry and now creates educational and training tools for other cosmetic chemists, all moisturizers—for the face, body, eyes, hands, wherever—have three main components that do the lion’s share of the work. The first is a substance called a humectant, such as glycerin or hyaluronic acid, which attracts moisture to the skin. The second is an occlusive, such as petrolatum or shea butter, which prevents that moisture from evaporating back into the air. The third is an emollient, which helps give skin a smooth, soft texture.
Within a particular line of products, Romanowski told me, formulations for different parts of the face or body do tend to be quite similar to one another, usually with little tweaks made for consumer preferences. Because faces produce more oil than the rest of the body, for instance, the line’s facial product might have its occlusive content reduced, or the formula might just be thinned out with water—super-thick face creams can make people unduly fearful of oiliness or breakouts. The same goes for turning a facial moisturizer into an eye cream: An existing formula could be changed to please buyers who prefer something more occlusive but less goopy. According to Romanowski, most companies will at least remove things such as fragrances, which can irritate the eye.
In some cases, however, my conspiracy theory appears to be fully justified. Romanowski said that in his experience, companies will release different products with the exact same formulations “as often as they can do it without anybody asking questions.” Formulating a totally new product from scratch requires expensive safety testing, Romanowski explained, and too much ingredient variation across a product line means companies have to buy more component chemicals in smaller, more expensive quantities. Keeping products as similar as possible saves money: Once a formula is established to be safe, companies can largely avoid additional testing, and they can buy its ingredients in large quantities. The more products that can be marketed out of those overhead costs, the better.
It’s hard to put concrete figures on just how much this kind of relabeling happens. Kelly Dobos, another independent cosmetic chemist, told me that in her experience, rebranding a face product as an eye cream without any changes is not that common, at least in part because many facial moisturizers currently on the market do contain eye irritants—not just fragrance but also sunscreen and exfoliating acids. The best eye creams, Dobos said, will not only be formulated specifically for use near the eye but are also likely to contain higher concentrations of the ingredients that help the ultrathin skin around your eyes attract and retain moisture. On a consumer level, distinguishing those kinds of concentrations is impossible, and higher concentrations don’t guarantee a better product. Facial moisturizers without irritants are perfectly safe for use around the eye, and they’ll likely yield indistinguishable results.
The upshot of all of this is that even when eye products are distinct from facial creams, they’re distinct mostly for what they don’t have in them, as opposed to what they do. That’s at odds with how eye creams tend to be presented to consumers, with branding that heavily emphasizes their special ingredients. Vitamins and acids lend these products an imprimatur of scientific progress, but one that’s rarely well supported by their chemical composition, according to Romanowski. “The stuff that you’re using today isn’t markedly different than something that was available 30 years ago,” he told me. “All the new things coming out are really just marketing stories about the technologies that have existed forever.”
The result, Romanowski said, is that most beauty products don’t vary all that much, and they’re mostly quite inexpensive to make. In fact, companies typically spend more money on a product’s packaging than on making the product itself, Romanowski told me. And the costs of packaging and manufacturing combined pale in comparison to what companies spend on branding and ads. Eye cream costs a lot in part because it’s very expensive to persuade a person to buy any particular beauty product. But pricing, too, is a marketing tactic. “The different price is something that convinces consumers that it’s a different product,” Romanowski said. After all, if an eye cream is supposed to be particularly cutting-edge or effective or ingredient rich, it should be more expensive.
People are sensitive about their eyes, which are the part of your body most likely to betray sadness or sleeplessness or, God forbid, age. Eyes are also particularly resistant to surface-level change. Dark circles and crow’s feet tend to be a result of your bone structure or genetics or the inexorable march of time instead of things that you can meaningfully control, with a cream or anything else. So much marketing goes into eye products precisely because there’s not much there there. They’ll keep your eye area moisturized, but they largely don’t (and can’t) work in the ways people hope they might.
That lack of control can be a profoundly unsettling prospect. Maybe the age you see in the mirror lies in stark contrast to the age in your head, or maybe you’d just rather not be prompted to contemplate your own mortality. And that, of course, is before you even get to the beauty standards of it all, which instruct us to take extraordinary measures to freeze ourselves in time or, if aging gracefully, to become something of a living semifreddo—frozen enough, but not uncannily so. Fears of fine lines seem only to be spreading: Teenagers are no longer too young to be marketed anti-aging skin-care products, and they’re buying them in droves.
No beauty products are bought or sold purely on effectiveness. Romanowski told me that he knows many cosmetic chemists who use eye cream, even though they know what the science behind it says. My conspiracy theory about eye cream is very arguably correct, but I had failed to consider a larger lesson of conspiracism: Truth isn’t the only thing that matters, and it might not even be that compelling.
With Google and Microsoft releasing new AI tools, it feels like the future is now with artificial intelligence. But how transformative are products like ChatGPT? Should we be worried about their impact? Are they a new Skynet or just a new Clippy?
Staff writers Charlie Warzel and Amanda Mull discuss.
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The following is a transcript of the episode:
Charlie Warzel: It feels like we’re moving toward this search paradigm where search is going to get a little more fun, a little more entertaining, and, possibly, not any more accurate.
And instead, the debates that we’re going to have about who gets to decide what are being entrusted to huge complicated machine-learning models that we have no idea how they’re trained or what they’re gonna do. It kind of sounds like a nightmare.
Amanda Mull: Welcome to Radio Atlantic. I’m staff writer Amanda Mull and I’m here with fellow staff writer Charlie Warzel, who writes about technology for us. Lately, Charlie’s been considering the nascent AI arms race between Google and Microsoft and why, as he put it in a recent piece, Clippy has touched the face of God. Charlie, it’s great to have you.
Warzel: Happy to be here. Happy to talk about Clippy.
Mull: Great. Great. So, Charlie, lately you’ve been writing about and reporting on AI now that Bing and Google have mutually decided to make all of us think about AI. But first I want to talk about finding a bookcase.
Warzel: Let’s do it. Let’s let Bing be our search butler here.
Mull: What I would like to find out is if the Ikea Kallax bookcase—a classic—can fit in the back of a 2002 Volkswagen Jetta.
Warzel: Okay. Alright, it’s searching, it’s still kind of creaking and groaning under the weight of your search. Okay.
Hello. This is Bing. The Ikea Kallax bookshelf has a height of 30 inches or 77 centimeters with a 58 inches, or 147 centimeters and a shelf depth of 15 inches or 39 centimeters. The 2002 Volkswagen Jetta has a trunk space of 47 inches wide, 42 inches deep and 22 inches tall. Based on these dimensions, it seems unlikely that the bookshelf can fit inside the trunk of the car. You may need to disassemble the bookshelf or use another vehicle to transport it.
Mull: It seems like we need to ask Bing to use the packaging dimensions and not the assembled dimensions.
Warzel: Ooh. Okay. It’s searching …
Hello, this is Bing, I apologize for my mistake. The Kallax packaging dimensions are not clearly stated on the IKEA website. However, based on some online reviews and forums, it seems the package size is about 60 inches long, 16 inches wide and six inches thick. The weight of the package is about 70 pounds. I hope this helps you plan your transportation better.
Well, I’m gonna say, “So, can it fit in the back of my 2002 Jetta?” Okay.
It might be possible to fit the package in the back of your 2002 Jetta if you fold down the rear seats and slide it in diagonally. However, it might be a tight fit and you should measure the space more carefully before attempting it. Alternatively, you could use a roof rack or trailer to transport the package more safely and easily.
Based off of me reading that back to you and that being your first presumably AI-chatbot experience. Is that underwhelming? Is that overwhelming? Is that whelming?
Mull: Honestly, it did work a little bit better than I expected for that kind of query.
Warzel: But I also didn’t feel like I was living in the future, right? Like I was kind of just like, Okay, cool.
Mull: Right. But I didn’t expect it to quite so efficiently respond to the query. Honestly. Just straight up.
Warzel: Yeah. So you know, points for Bing.
Mull: Yeah, it’s strange, after hearing so much hype about AI and about the promise of AI search and about how this could change the internet and change our experience with the internet, to finally go through the process of using it and end up like, Oh, that was okay.
Warzel: Yeah.
Mull: Can you tell me in basic, straightforward terms, what it is that these services are doing?
Warzel: So it’s kind of a couple of things that are happening at once that give it this feeling of the smart robot who’s returning your every query. You have the GPT-3, GPT-4, whatever style text model, which is completing based off of all of this information it’s absorbed, completing what’s coming next. Then layered on top of that, you have all that Bing can do or that Google can do with its chatbot in search in general, and it’s kind of mashing those two together. So when we say “Can I fit this IKEA bookshelf into my Jetta?” it’s just doing kind of raw Google searches.
Mull: Yeah.
Warzel: And instead of even giving you links, we’re just going to give you the definitive answer. And that to me feels a little like, Yes, this is helpful. Are we also sort of missing the bigger picture of what people are actually looking for when they’re trying to search?
Mull: Right. It seems like Microsoft and Google in their AI-search efforts are perhaps trying to provide us with God’s perfect Redditor. This is the guy who knows the answer and it’s an AI chatbot who has looked at all of Reddit and condensed it for you.
Warzel: This is honestly one of my big concerns about AI-enabled search in general, which is that we’ve been doing this since, I don’t know, like 2016. Having these really furious debates over content moderation and who gets to say what. And in the world of search, there are all these different ideas about what websites Google is going to elevate. You know, “Is it going to be third parties that Google hires to evaluate the quality of different links when it comes to financial information, medical information, news, or is it going to be engineers at Google themselves? Is Google going to be the arbiter of truth here?”
That was in an environment with search where it was still, “We’re going to give you a slew of links,” right? And then it’s choose-your-own-adventure. This is a new paradigm that essentially says, “We’re going to give you a canonical, definitive answer.” The machine is going to scroll through and it’s going to talk to you like a human being, it’s going to speak really confidently, and it’s going to give you the information to the best of its ability and as we know, these machines right now are really good at confidently lying or bullshitting.
Mull: Yeah. It seems like this has enormous capacity to sort of obscure what is happening in a way that seems not helpful. What do you mean by B.S.? Can you give us an example?
Warzel: There are so many examples of people typing stuff in. “Write me a book report about Animal Farm,” [or] some book, and it will come back with very confidently stated false facts. Someone described it as—and I really like it—“spicy autocomplete.” Which is just that these models have scanned billions and billions of pieces of information from books to commentary to literally everything and it’s just predicting, based off of that, what should come next. And so it’s not necessarily trained to give you these canonical definitive answers. The confidence and the sophistication with which it gives you an answer leads you to believe that the machine’s telling you the truth when it’s stating something that’s false.
Mull: We’re going to take a short break and we’ll be right back.
Mull: Are there any good examples that we’ve seen so far in the extremely early days of these tools that demonstrate what some of the potential pitfalls are?
Warzel: A good early example is that in Google’s demo of its own search chatbot tool, it apparently, in one of its promos, surfaced something about the James Webb Space Telescope that was incorrect.
And Google’s stock price slid by like 8 percent on that day. But then online there was this whole series of people—like astrophysicists—who were debating, “Actually like technically … maybe the Google answer was right.”
And so you kind of got this preview almost of what the future of all this is going to be, which is that, you have the machine confidently stating something and then all these different people arguing about whether or not this was true or false and meanwhile, everyone’s gaining and losing fortunes in the stock market based off of it. It was a very kind of dystopian preview.
Mull: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think that when it comes to shopping, recommendations, confident recommendations, [are] a big existential problem in online commerce. Because we have this vast array of options on the internet and they are too many and too confusing for people to make meaningful sense of them and feel confident in purchasing things, often. So the tone of AI and the confidence with which it says things gives it an opportunity to be especially manipulative in a lot of ways, but with commerce in particular, because often what people go to Google for when they’re trying to figure out if they should buy something is to hear someone confidently tell you, “This will work for you.” It seems like this can be exploited by all the same forces making your Google results now absolutely unusable in a lot of ways.
Warzel: Yeah, I mean, to me what’s really tough to wrap my head around is that the whole promise of these large language models that generative AIs are built off of is that it has read the internet and it has read every great book and it has read every … it’s trained off of more information than you could ever even imagine cramming into a million people’s brains.
And if you start monetizing this, what you’re doing then is you’re, in essence, retraining this thing that is supposedly transformative to say, “Yes, we know that like you are the modern Library of Alexandria. But we would really love it if you put this canine chew toy at the top of the stack,” right?
There’s something that’s so corrupt about that premise that you have the totality of the world’s information at your disposal. And this product is actually the thing that you need to show above everything else because somebody paid for it.
And it’s also, to me we’re adding a whole other level of opacity to this. These models are really hard to understand. And then it’s gonna be very difficult to unravel where the money is coming from, and Google right now, it’s just like, “Hey, this thing this box is green around it and it says paid or it says ad.”
You just, even if you click on it, you kind of know, Oh yeah, that’s how the game works. This could be totally different and sort of insidious and maybe not nefarious, but it’s like the virus of capitalism, infecting the host of the AI or something like that, you know?
Mull: Right, right. When some fundamental structure of the internet—and how regular people use the internet—changes, there’s always so many unintended and unpredictable consequences. Even people who are not particularly interested in tech can look at social media and go, Yeah, the advent of these platforms fundamentally changed the way that a lot of people interact with their friends, interact with politics, interact with information.
It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which this doesn’t have just sort of all kinds of messy, unintended consequences that we probably can’t predict right now. The signal that I think these companies are picking up on is that in order to solve problems, people generally want to interact with other people. You want to be able to walk into a store and ask a question of a salesperson. You want to be able to get someone on the phone to fix a problem for you. You want to ask a knowledgeable individual about something you’re unsure of and benefit from their expertise. It seems like they’re just fundamentally misdiagnosing the actual solutions that people want, which is to have more of their life mediated by interactions with other people than interactions with layers of technology.
Warzel: This is, I mean really and truly always what you butt up against with people who are pushing technological change forward. It is seen as a challenge, right? To create an artificial general intelligence.
That has been the stuff of computer-science dreams for decades and decades and it’s sort of this quest to do this thing that feels almost unthinkable, right? And then of course it’s like, Oh well we need to commercialize it, and then you get into this kind of territory.
Mull: Yeah.
Warzel: One of the true fears that a lot of people have, that I think is very well-founded if we are actually entering a new epoch or whatever you wanna call it of life dominated by artificial intelligences, is that there’s going to be this stratification, this class stratification, where it’s like, “Congratulations, you will be able to see an AI doctor anywhere, as soon as you want and it’s going to do like a fairly reasonably good job of diagnosing you with whatever,” right? It’s going to be a really competent thing.
Meanwhile, the people who have the means and the power and the money, they’re going to have the in-person doctor experience, right? They’re going to actually have the person lay hands on them and look at them and talk to them and ask them those questions and use that expertise and have the bedside manner and all those things. Whereas the rest of us are going to get …
Mull: Doc bot.
Warzel: Doc bot. Exactly, and so I think that that’s a very real thing that goes just beyond even the experience of online consumption to buy products or to get information. It goes to like the very heart of very important services, right?
I would love to not trust my taxes to an AI accountant no matter how good it gets. Or have an AI financial adviser who is responding faster than any other human could to algorithmic triggers in the stock market to buy, sell, and trade. But also, a great thing about a financial adviser who’s not responding instantaneously to algorithmic shocks is they have … they have the ability to be patient, to wait, to use their creativity or their knowledge, all these things. I think that’s the scariest part about the era, is that it does take so much humanity out of what we’re headed toward.
And the human interaction becomes even more and more of a luxury. The fanciest technology billionaires don’t let their kids have screen time because they’re terrified of what the screens are doing to them. That kind of thing repeats, and with the AI it’s weird and possibly quite consequential.
Mull: Yeah, nobody should be going to an AI doctor that’s not widely used by billionaires themselves. I’ll let the VCs go first.
Charlie, thank you so much. This was fascinating and unsettling. I appreciate you walking me through all this.
Warzel: “Fascinating and unsettling” is my wheelhouse. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
Mull: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by A.C. Valdez, Theo Balcomb, and Kevin Townsend. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of audio at The Atlantic. Thanks for listening.
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Everyone loves to feel like they’re getting a good deal. It’s a trait found across history and geography: People haggled in the agoras and souks of antiquity; they bargain in car dealerships; they scour the internet for coupon codes. Now deal hunting has been discovered by TikTok, where an audience made up overwhelmingly of teens and young adults has gathered to worship at the altar of the dupe.
Short for duplicate, dupes are less-expensive alternatives to brand-name products. Don’t want to pay $118 for a Lululemon sweatshirt? Amazon will sell you a $39 version that is practically identical when viewed from a distance. Does $600 seem like a little much for what amounts to a very elaborate curling iron, even if it is made by Dyson? TikTok loves this $299 alternative, which is, incidentally, also made by a vacuum brand.
Virtually anything can be duped, and virtually everything is: clothing, shoes, home decor, personal electronics, exercise gear, furniture, household cleaners, and every cosmetic or skin-care product imaginable. If the more expensive products have themselves already been the object of viral TikTok acclaim, that’s even better. TikTokers source their dupes from big-box stores or the anonymous depths of Amazon, and the recommendations arrive with the platform’s characteristic casualness. In one of the most popular formats, a pretty young woman will rave into her front-facing camera about drugstore makeup or discount shapewear like a friend sharing some juicy gossip after a couple of glasses of wine. The most compelling of these recommendations take a slightly conspiratorial tone, as though the breakthrough being shared isn’t a product available with free two-day shipping but a fundamental glitch in the matrix.
Dupe-recommendation videos are sometimes referred to as “de-influencing,” in the sense that they seem to be at war with all of the expensive junk that traditional influencers hawk online. From that perspective, dupes are suffused with a grand promise: If branding is meant to trick you into spending money, maybe a dedication to dupes means it hasn’t worked on you. But the reality is, well, a little bit trickier.
The term dupe is itself a product of an earlier internet era: the late 2000s, when finding information about your niche interests meant relying on a diffuse network of bloggers and message boards. I remember first hearing the term around 2010, on nail-polish blogs where people traded tips on finding dupes for cult-favorite shades that had been long since discontinued. During the same period, beauty bloggers used the term to theorize about the relationship between makeup brands. If you didn’t want to pay for a particular concealer from Giorgio Armani, the logic went, you might be able to find a dupe sold by Maybelline, because they’re both owned by L’Oréal and would therefore be more likely to have similar formulations.
The concept of dupes has fuzzy edges—it is, after all, a designation primarily marshaled by teens on the internet. Generally, dupes aren’t counterfeit products masquerading as the real thing, but they’re similar enough that many of them might be fairly described as knockoffs, which is itself a fuzzy term capacious enough to include purposeful copycats on both sides of copyright law. Dupes don’t need to be cheap in absolute terms—300 bucks is still a lot to spend on a hair gadget, for example—though many of them are. And they aren’t necessarily of lower quality—though, again, many of them are. What’s most important is that a dupe is significantly less expensive than whatever original product is being held up as simultaneously a holy grail and an overpriced rip-off, and the dupe needs to be close enough in appearance or performance to make the cheaper option seem like a genuinely good deal.
[Read: The death of the smart shopper]
That dupes would gain prominence in the beauty industry makes perfect sense, if for no other reason than that people who buy beauty products are right to suspect that they’re being fooled. Compared with other kinds of products, makeup and skin care can have extraordinarily high markups, and the more a product is marked up, the easier it is for a competitor to make something similar and lower the price. In consumer electronics, the average gross margin in the industry currently hovers from 20 to 30 percent. A particularly successful firm such as Samsung can reach toward 40. Meanwhile, Estée Lauder, which owns beauty brands such as MAC and Clinique, had a gross margin of more than 73 percent at the end of 2022. Much of the beauty industry’s markup gets sunk into customer-acquisition costs—marketing and branding efforts to convince people that, among other things, there’s a real difference between the products sold by luxury brands and those available at Target. Sometimes there is, but more often, you’d be just as happy with the dupe.
According to Amy Pei, a marketing professor at Northeastern University who studies shopping on digital platforms, there’s no real beginning to the dupe trend. Consumer interest in lower-cost options is as old as the consumer market itself, as is the propensity for brands to make their own versions of already-popular products and try to undercut one another on price. Instead, the internet’s primary innovation is the term itself. Pei used the example of knockoff Eames chairs, which have been around almost as long as Eames chairs themselves after their introduction in the 1950s. When I was obsessing over my mom’s fashion magazines in the 1990s, recommendations for similar, less expensive clothes and beauty products were already a mainstay of the shopping pages at the front of the book. And interest in “look for less” options has long pushed buyers and sellers beyond the strictly legal; in the early 2000s, teenagers at my high school were already whispering about how to buy fake Louis Vuitton bags on band and orchestra field trips to New York.
All of which is to say: In considering the dupe phenomenon, it would be folly to commit what you might call the “Fundamental TikTok Error,” which happens when adults decide that kids these days are doing something truly novel and consequential when in fact they’re just being normal teens. The novelty is primarily perceptual: If you show up at a high school to watch the teens, the police will probably want to speak with you, but you can scroll Instagram and dissect TikToks all day. In reality, adolescents and young adults have been acutely trend conscious and acutely incapable of paying for expensive stuff for generations, and cool teens have fancied themselves too smart for advertising since at least the rise of the counterculture in the 1960s.
What might have changed from 15 or 20 years ago, Pei told me, is the way that young people perceive the act of buying dupes, knockoffs, and counterfeits. Until very recently, buyers tended to hope that their lower-price products would go undetected by the general public and instead be mistaken for the real thing. You might confide in a friend about the great deal you found, but the point of finding it was to appear to all the world like you could afford the fancy clothes and expensive makeup and luxury home decor. You certainly didn’t want to go viral for gushing about off-brand leggings, which might suggest that you were cheap, broke, or both. Now gushing about those leggings might make you a well-regarded internet celebrity.
At first blush, this might seem like a modestly positive change in how young people relate to the stuff they buy, in line with other putatively adversarial developments in how young people think about consumption. These shoppers, we are told, are concerned about climate change and wastefulness and corporate power, and rising prices and deepening economic precarity have complicated their feelings about conspicuous wealth. If you’re 22 and have a $600 curling wand, what are you, some kind of nepo baby? Today, with the advent of online shopping’s aimless, meaningless variety, unearthing a good dupe can be seen as a sign of cleverness: Even if momentarily, you’ve bent the internet to your will. It’s a win for the little guy, and you, personally, as an individual, are the little guy.
But this shift isn’t actually any kind of meaningful rebuke of corporate marketing, nor is it an expression of Gen Z’s widely touted anti-consumerist beliefs. Instead, it’s just more consumption. Branding is, yes, absolutely fake, and it’s often wielded to trick people into parting with their money in ways that are unnecessary or unsatisfying. But the material reality of objects is somewhat less fungible, and although there is plenty of expensive, low-quality crap sloshing around in the American consumer market, the differences in what two similar items cost isn’t always just a marketing mirage. High-quality materials, skilled labor, good working conditions, and thorough product development all cost more money than their alternatives. They also produce far more useful, durable, and beautiful results.
[Read: Seriously, what are you supposed to do with old clothes?]
None of which is to say that the most expensive version of anything is always the best, or that every less expensive option is wasteful trash. Rather, the problem is that in the American consumer market, the relationship between price and quality can be impossible to discern, and the trend cycle has sped up so much that we’re always supposed to be shopping for something. Americans—particularly the young people overrepresented on TikTok—are bombarded by constantly changing media and social messaging about how we’re supposed to dress, groom ourselves, decorate our homes, and live our lives. Yet Americans are also entitled to very little information about the products we buy, and the knowledge necessary to evaluate the quality of a dress’s fabric or the structural integrity of a new couch is not nearly as common as it once was. If you have no real way to parse the differences in the products available to you, why wouldn’t you just buy the cheapest acceptable version of everything, especially if you know it will feel hopelessly out of date in six months?
This constant churn is good for pretty much anyone selling consumer products, no matter the price point—even most brands whose products are getting knocked off left and right. “If I were the designer brands, I wouldn’t be too concerned about this phenomenon,” Pei said. “I don’t think I am losing sales to the duplicates. In fact, I’ve been getting free advertising.” Some brands, such as Ugg, even make and market their own dupes. The idea that copycats are actually good for more expensive brands is well supported by research: Counterfeit products are known to increase the public profile of high-end brands and lead to more sales overall, even if those brands do lose out on some sales of a specific product. Dupe hunting is, at its core, a tacit admission that you actually do really want the more expensive product—and, according to Pei, once you own a dupe, it’s a constant reminder of that other, probably nicer thing that you might like even more.
This is how consumers are created: Desires are induced in young people, and young people are provided with affordable ways to explore them. As they get older, their paychecks will tend to get bigger, and their perception of what constitutes a good deal—or a justifiable splurge—might shift. And for those whose income or spending patterns don’t climb the aspiration ladder, well, they just keep buying dupes. During this year’s Super Bowl, the makeup brand e.l.f. ran a commercial starring Jennifer Coolidge and co-written by The White Lotus’s Mike White. In some of the most expensive airtime in the history of television, the brand was selling one of TikTok’s favorite dupes: a $10 makeup primer with a sticky finish, which fans swear will stick makeup to your face just as well as Milk Makeup’s similar $36 product. Choose whichever one you want. Either way, you keep buying.
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Amazon is getting worse, but you probably already knew that, because you probably shop at Amazon. The online retail behemoth’s search results are full of ads and sponsored results that can push actually relevant, well-reviewed options far down the page. The proportion of its inventory that comes from brands with names like Fkprorjv and BIDLOTCUE seems to be constantly expanding. Many simple queries yield results that appear to be the exact same product over and over again—sometimes with the exact same photos—but all with different names, sellers, prices, ratings, and customer reviews. If you squint, you can distinguish between some of the products, which feels like playing a decidedly less whimsical version of “spot the difference” picture games.
Last week, the journalist John Herrman published a theory on why, exactly, Amazon seems so uninterested in the faltering quality of its shopping experience: The company would rather leave the complicated, labor-intensive business of selling things to people to someone else. To do that, it has opened its doors to roughly 2 million third-party sellers, whether they are foreign manufacturers looking for more direct access to customers or the disciples of “grindset” influencers who want to use SEO hacks to fund the purchase of rental properties. In the process, Amazon has cultivated a decentralized, disorienting mess with little in the way of discernible quality control or organization. According to Herrman, that’s mainly because Amazon’s primary goal is selling the infrastructure of online shopping to other businesses—things like checkout, payment processing, and order fulfillment, which even large retailers can struggle to handle efficiently. Why be Amazon when you can instead make everyone else be Amazon and take a cut?
Amazon’s dominance has bent competitors such as Walmart and Target to ape the same tactics that can make the site so unwieldy: Other companies’ search results are now similarly dotted with strange offerings from largely unrecognizable third parties, devolving after a page or two into a heap of listings with indeterminate origins and quality. And then there are retailers like Wayfair, which offers seemingly unlimited home-decor options but holds almost no inventory of its own, instead letting a menagerie of mostly hidden suppliers ship their wares directly to buyers.
Ostensibly, the rise of online shopping promised a greater-than-ever opportunity for buyers to be discerning and well educated about their options. The appeal of Amazon and other megaretailers is primarily that of affordable abundance—somewhere in there is the right thing at the right price, and you can consider endless options until you’re satisfied. But what’s abundant lately is undifferentiated junk. In these conditions, understanding what it is you’re buying, where it came from, and what you can expect of it is a fool’s errand. E-commerce giants have pushed to the point of absurdity a problem that’s central to the consumer system: It’s basically impossible to be an informed consumer, and it always has been.
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What, exactly, it means to be an informed consumer in practical terms is somewhat nebulous, even though the notion is regularly invoked when buying jeans, used cars, surgical procedures, and basically everything else you can think of. In general, it’s the idea that people can effectively mitigate financial risk by doing their research and shopping around before buying anything. It emanates from the common-law doctrine of caveat emptor—“let the buyer beware”—which asserts that not only can you effectively mitigate your own risks, but it’s your legal responsibility to do so.
Caveat emptor, if only because it’s Latin, carries the imprimatur of ancient wisdom, but it’s still an important principle of modern consumer law in the United States. Products have to meet certain safety standards and sellers cannot falsely advertise their wares, but even when they violate the country’s consumer-protection laws, the burden of proof is usually on the consumer, and pursuing even a strong case can be prohibitively expensive and drawn-out. Beyond that, marketers, salespeople, and retailers are free to foster a casual relationship with the truth in ways that those without the benefit of rarefied legal training might describe as lying.
All of which is to say: The supposedly informed consumer has always been a misnomer. Purchases are fundamentally asymmetrical interactions. Sellers will almost always know more than you do, and they are free to hide most of it. When buying a home, taking a car in for repairs, choosing a doctor, or deciding whether you actually need a separate eye cream or it’s all just moisturizer in a smaller tub, you will generally end up playing whack-a-mole with your own ignorance. And that’s to say nothing of situations in which an informed decision would require, for example, understanding a product’s supply chain in order to avoid buying things made through forced labor.
The economist Walton Hale Hamilton once wrote as much while attempting to find caveat emptor’s historical origin: “The ordinary man, who ventures forth to market with only his senses as his chapmen finds himself face to face with the great collectivism of salesmanship, with its seried ranks to batter down resistance and render impotent his will,” he wrote. “As an individual he cannot be sure the article he was induced to purchase satisfies a need he really feels.” And that was in 1931.
Hamilton could not have predicted how the internet would make the problem so much worse. Online shopping as it is currently constituted—highly mediated by Amazon, Google, Meta, and now TikTok—causes such problems because it’s good at feeling highly informative. Before you buy anything, you can read reviews, look up terms you don’t understand, find out what everyone else is buying, and watch videos to get a better look at a product. You can consult the opinions of people who should have better judgment or more information than you do—fitness influencers can tell you which leggings to buy, makeup artists can tell you about their favorite concealers, reviewers at sites such as Wirecutter and The Strategist can tell you about everything else. You can comparison-shop across multiple brands and retailers without leaving your home, culminating in the purchase of the best product or service at the best price for your needs. If you can’t figure it out, maybe that’s a you problem.
Sometimes, it all works. The customer reviews for a pair of shoes advise you to go up a half size and you get the perfect fit, or careful searching yields a coupon code if you buy from a different website. More common, though, is something like consumer vertigo: The search results are full of ads. You can’t come up with the right string of words to get more useful results. The reviews, both on the retailer’s site and on third-party websites you’ve mostly never heard of, seem fake. You can’t get the site’s chatbot—or is it a real person limited to an approved script?—to answer a basic question. You suspect that the influencers are being secretly compensated even when their posts aren’t tagged as advertisements, and maybe that they’ve never used the things they recommend at all.
At some point in here, you get annoyed and close your browser tab, or your child asks for a snack and you forget what you were doing. In two days, you remember that you still need to buy a new set of bedsheets or want a robot vacuum. You start again.
[Read: Seriously, what are you supposed to do with old clothes?]
Because you’re shopping online, you can’t go look at most of the products in a store, and you can’t tell how—or whether—one thing is different from the very similar thing two thumbnails down. You can’t tell if a particular product will spy on you or sell your data. You’ll have already consented to whatever is in the lengthy, impenetrable legalese of its user agreement just by powering it up. You buy something cheap and hope it holds up—or at least tides you over—for a while. If it doesn’t, you probably can’t get someone on the phone to solve your problem, so you toss it or squirrel it away in the back of a storage closet. You watch some TikToks made by a seemingly endless array of women in spacious suburban homes whose job seems to be making short videos of all the actually good products on Amazon, which you can find in their customized storefronts. Do you need a silicone pouch that will hang off your bathroom counter and hold your flat iron? Maybe.
All of this might feel unforgivably trivial. You don’t feel confident purchasing a laundry hamper? So what? But the fact that the highly visible scaffolding of digital commerce—largely built and maintained by the same handful of companies that control much of the internet itself—is deteriorating so rapidly does not portend well for those of us on the business end of these systems, who are protected by little other than our own doggedness. And many of the people involved in the consumer system aren’t even afforded that. If you can’t differentiate one product from a dozen listings for a seemingly identical thing, you can’t even begin to understand the conditions under which it was produced, or at what cost to workers and the environment.
As it stands, tech companies and global manufacturing have taken the weaknesses that have always existed in the idea of the informed consumer and exploited them to their logical extreme. The sense of control that the consumer system claims to offer has always been mostly illusory, and that’s never been clearer than while watching the promise of information and abundance devolve into meaninglessness. We already know what a world run on Amazon’s infrastructure is like. We’re living in it.
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