Exclusive: Charlotte Tilbury Comes For Her Copycats

There are celebrities, founders and celebrity founders, and then there’s Charlotte Tilbury.

Last week, the makeup artist and founder, president and chief creative officer of her eponymous makeup label arrived to the brand’s new two-story, 4300-square-foot flagship in London’s Covent Garden — arm in arm with supermodels Jourdan Dunn and Twiggy and her influencer niece Bella Broekman-Tilbury. She was greeted by hundreds of fans chanting her name and waving Union Jack flags redone in her brand’s signature pink and brown. The doors were formally opened with a lavish ceremony complete with ballerinas and a marching band. Listening to the cheers, there were tears in her eyes.

“The love in the crowd, and the feeling, the euphoric joy,” Tilbury recalled to The Business of Beauty hours afterward in an exclusive interview. Her airbrush-perfect cheekbones were gleaming, even through the screen. “It was powerful. It was amazing! It was an ecstatic, euphoric state.”

The newest and largest of Tilbury’s 31 stand-alone stores, Covent Garden is a temple to Tilbury’s glamorous point of view — one that is frequently imitated in the beauty industry today. Several of her best-sellers, from the Hollywood Flawless Filter, a $49 combination primer, “glow-booster” and base, to the $42 Contour Wand, a favourite of countless TikTok beauty influencers, have been duped by lower-priced mass brands like E.l.f. Cosmetics and MCoBeauty.

“I’m an innovator, not an imitator!” Tilbury said. Her usual speech, punctuated at regular intervals with “darlings” and “absolutelys,” accelerates when talking about knockoffs. “When you dupe, you dupe the consumer. That upsets me so much as a perfectionist, as an innovator, as a creator, as an artist.”

The feeling has led her to take aim at copycats with a new campaign called “Legendary. For a Reason.” which stars Dunn and Kate Moss alongside Tilbury’s most knocked-off products, including Flawless Filter, Hollywood Contour Wand and Glowgasm. Its intent, according to the brand, is to “drive awareness” that the originals are worth the splurge.

The campaign’s arrival comes as Charlotte Tilbury Beauty enters its 13th year as one of the most successful beauty labels to launch this century. It reported £466 million ($568 million) in sales in 2023, according to documents filed with the UK’s Companies House. Since it was acquired by Spanish fashion and beauty giant Puig in 2020 at a $1.2 billion valuation, the conglomerate’s revenue has doubled, while the brand’s revenue has tripled. Tilbury has the number one prestige makeup brand in the UK, and ranks number three in the US, according to Circana; it’s also become the number one non-legacy beauty brand for organic influencer posts, according to Launchmetrics’ 2024 reporting.

“I’ve seen firsthand how knowledgeable and enthusiastic she is about her products,” said Meredith Duxbury, a model and Tilbury muse with a following of over 20 million. “From the science behind them to how she messages them. She’s a marketing genius.”

While the dupes are a growing liability, Tilbury is committed to preserving the integrity of the brand that bears her name, and hopes to take it further and wider this year: The line will soon launch in Mexico through Sephora, with other plans to expand its presence in the Middle East and China.

“Imagine, I’m only in 3500 points of distribution, and I’m number one in most stores that I’m in, but it’s like, there’s so much still to do,” Tilbury said. And though 13 years marks a milestone, she feels firmly on the cusp of adolescence.

“Watch out!” Tilbury joked. “I’m finally a teenager!”

“Innovator, Not Imitator”

Hollywood Flawless Filter launched eight years ago this month on the faces of Mandy Moore and Greta Gerwig at the Golden Globe Awards. Tilbury’s original brief for the product was to bring an Instagram filter to life with a base that had a blurring effect, creating a formula that “had never existed in the beauty industry,” she said.

That effect was achieved with proprietary airbrush polymers; such ingredients that offer something new or different from other products on the market have since become her signature.

“Sometimes my scientists are like, ‘Oh Christ, here she comes,’” Tilbury said. “I’ve got these crazy ideas, and whether in my lifetime they will ever be achieved, we don’t know.”

Her premium standards can create logistics difficulties, like when her Pinkgasm “light wand” blush-highlighter quickly sold out after going viral in 2021. Her supplier for one of the product’s main ingredients couldn’t fulfil her order for six months, and suggested they alter the formula to get it back on shelves; Tilbury balked.

“‘Will I dumb down my formula?’ Absolutely not!” Tilbury said. “I went out of stock for eight months. I would rather that, because when you get a Charlotte Tilbury product, you get my signature.”

Her unique approach has inspired plenty of copycats, particularly as the “dupe” craze in beauty has hit a fever pitch in recent years. In 2019, a High Court judge ruled in Tilbury’s favour over a copyright infringement lawsuit brought against the discount supermarket chain Aldi, which sold a similar product to its Filmstar Bronze and Glow contour-highlighter palette.

But the war between Tilbury and her dupes has only intensified since, as posts tagged #dupe and #makeupdupe on TikTok now number in the hundreds of thousands. Recent events, including the much-discussed “Walmart Birkin” or the Target launch of Australian cosmetics label MCoBeauty, which creates lower-priced versions of items from buzzy beauty brands like Sol de Janiero and Dior, indicate that dupes have never been hotter.

With the new campaign, Tilbury wants to remind her audience, and the market at large, that there’s nothing quite like the real deal. “I have the number one highlighter in the US and the UK, the number one powder in all of Europe,” she explained. “They have their number one in every market, because they perform so much better, sorry, honest truth, than anyone else.”

Tilbury has intellectual property rights to her trademarks and design codes, the latter of which Aldi violated with its Filmstar dupe. But it’s much harder to prosecute similarities in formula. Perhaps predictably, Tilbury advocates for stronger cosmetic IP laws around the world. But in the meantime, the war against dupes seems to wage largely outside the courtroom, in the public square of consumer opinion.

Long Way to Glow

Tilbury’s singular devotion to her beauty point of view can be observed in the fact that, for the past three decades, her look has remained largely the same: Crimson bombshell hair, straight bangs that collide with feathery lashes on rose-gold eyelids, form-fitting dresses and always, a pair of stilettos.

She’s translated that point-of-view to her brand, and it is on full display in the new Covent Garden flagship, which is something of a makeup counter made megaplex. Inside, there’s a pink tufted room devoted to the brand’s signature “Pillow Talk” collection, a “Boudoir” that will host master classes, and a spa that resembles the inside of a moisturiser jar, where visitors can receive express and full-length treatments; hundreds of appointments have already been made.

But it can also be observed in her expansive career, which few makeup artists of her ilk can claim. There are artists known for their runway work (like Pat McGrath) or celebrity clients (like Gucci Westman) or product development genius (like Bobbi Brown). And then there’s Tilbury, who has done all three: She cut her teeth backstage at fashion week, did red carpet makeup during awards season and consulted on MAC and Tom Ford’s cosmetic lines. She’s also done weddings, too, for the likes of high-profile brides like Kate Moss and Amal Clooney.

Though better known for a high-glam, airbrushed look, Tilbury embraces trends like clean girl makeup, citing her fashion bona fides. “I’ve done Kate Moss on a beach with some freckles,” she said. “I’ve done J.Lo for the red carpet. I’ve had a very rare career, where I’ve been able to take all of that high fashion world and red carpet glamour world and turn it into a consumer brand.”

Tilbury will always be a makeup artist, but has embraced her life as a beauty executive overseeing some 2800 employees worldwide. The recent announcement that Puig would acquire the rest of the brand by 2030 suggested she may exit the brand after that point; when I asked Tilbury about it, she deflected with a cheerful laugh.

“I love [Puig] and I love my brand,” she said, “It’s just a gorgeous continuation. You know, we’ve got so many incredible innovations coming up. We’ve got so much to do. We’ve got to conquer the world.”

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