Rarity vs scarcity: how dupe culture turns you against yourself
I. Market Magic: The False Allure of Scarcity
There is something to be said about scarcity versus rarity. Nowadays, we see an abundance of limited‑edition fragrances: micro‑batches released under glossy labels; each bottle serialised to stoke collectors’ appetites. I find myself uneasy with such “rarity,” for it is a contrivance, an artifice of supply‑management designed not by nature but by marketing.
Looking at Veblen’s theoretical framework, these artificially imposed limitations function as prominent indicators within a status-driven economy, disconnected from any authentic material scarcity. Veblen posits that the upper echelons of society exploit these deliberately constrained editions, not due to any essential need, but rather to exhibit their affluence: rarity is performative, serving as a social spectacle. This intentional limitation transmutes each item into a symbol of prestige; its value is derived not from an intrinsic rarity but from its capacity to signify exclusivity and distinguish its possessor from the general populace.
Scarcity, by contrast, is woven into the very fabric of existence. It is neither strategised nor spun; it simply is. Georg Simmel, in The Philosophy of Money, insists that “value, strictly speaking, only emerges where scarcity exists; without scarcity, an object would be worthless.”
The overall perfume industry, at every level, understands this fact however, due to the shifts in consumer trends; the desire from consumers to have stable, linear, perfumes; and the overloading of cosmetic regulations imposed on natural materials; such scarcity – that is value – must be artificially manufactured in a number of ways, to justify the rarity of what isn’t scarce.
Emmanuel Wardi sees these artificial-scarcity tactics not as cynical spin, but as modern ritual. He argues that “big houses market this symbolic dimension as embodied by ritual practices that define the modern consumer’s act of buying”, in other words, micro-batches, serialised editions and timed drops become liturgies that consecrate the fragrance and the buyer alike. Luxury, in perfumery as well, thus becomes a “total social fact”, a unified ritual complex in which production, distribution and consumption fuse into a single sacred drama. When a brand releases “only 200 bottles worldwide,” that limitation is less about scarcity than about staging a communal act: the consumer’s purchase mimics a ceremonial offering through rituals designed to imbue perfectly reproducible scents with an aura of the ineffable.
This ritualised staging of scarcity, however, equals to the creation of simulacra, hyperreal signs that mask any genuine referent. As Baudrillard argued, modern consumers prize sign-value over use, or exchange-value that is that we buy no longer an object for what it is or does but for what it means in a social drama. For they cannot authentically sell scarcity, perfume houses thus ritually imbue their products with an aura of sacred otherness, turning them into simulacra: perfumes no longer are valued for the complex and masterful arrangements of their ingredients but for their relevance as communal totems.
The dupe phenomenon is a direct consequence of this dynamic. By fleeing the hyperreal pageantry of manufactured scarcity, consumers end up insisting that perfume, at its essence, isn’t worth much. Drawing from Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, we can infer that the relentless staging of exclusivity alienates us from direct experience; when every launch feels like theatre, direct experience is sacrificed to image, and weariness sets in. In choosing a dupe, shoppers enact a subtle detournement, borrowing the very scent they once coveted while rejecting its ceremonial trappings. This is the moment the simulacrum implodes: the staged scarcity collapses, exposing the fragrance as a “real without origin,” a hyperreal sign with no material referent.
Yet here lies the irony: once customers discover they can enjoy the identical accords for €15 instead of €200, they conclude that no perfume is ever truly worth €200: they’ve shifted the entire value judgment onto price alone. Dupes thus not only reclaim a scent’s use-value – its composition, sillage, longevity – but also deplete the broader market’s willingness to pay for genuine artistry. A masterful blend of rare naturals, packaged in a modest bottle and fairly priced, is now met with suspicion: “if it isn’t expensive, it can’t be good.” In effect, consumers reverse-engineer the sign-value: they see low price as the ultimate sign of low quality.
This irony underscores a wider philosophical lesson: when sign-value utterly eclipses use-value, consumers lose faith in both the myth and the substance. The dupe phenomenon, then, is not just a search for affordability, but a potent critique of an industry that taught its audience to worship rarity rather than scarcity and now finds that, in the absence of spectacle, the art itself is undervalued.
II. Scent and the Slipping Now
This economic and philosophical drama can obscure perfume’s true vocation, which partly explains my general aversion for manufactured scarcity. I have always had a hard time with limited edition perfumes, in the sense that perfume stands at the junction between art and consumption, that is that the very point of a perfume is to be worn, that is consumed and enjoyed.
While I understand the frustration that comes with loving a perfume, matching our identity to its molecules, only for it to be finished, and vanished, one should maybe see here a proper perfume-centric paradox. Perfumes, by nature, point to what has vanished. The very mechanism to enjoy them relies on their vanishing, on their decomposition. Perfumes were an answer to this core question, and fear, of humankind: death, and what comes after. The mere fact that they would still linger in the air, hours after being burnt, or sprayed, or worn; the fact that they could instantly, vividly, resuscitate a deceased loved one or long-forsaken happy memory are, somehow, a reassurance that there is no end to the act of living. Ann‑Sophie Barwich reminds us that “in seeking the scent of a departed loved one, we confront absence and presence in a single breath,” suggesting that the act of smelling becomes both an encounter with loss and a fleeting reunion.
This programmed vanishing is nothing less than an existential echo of Heidegger’s being-toward-death: each fragrant breath already carries its own cessation. meThe intrinsic purpose of perfume lies in its ability to decompose: to disperse its molecular structure into the atmosphere and subsequently dissolve. This inherent contradiction resides at the essence of the art, as a fragrance cannot be preserved indefinitely nor infinitely replicated. As Martin Heidegger teaches in Being and Time, our very mode of existing is a “being-toward-death,” meaning that each present moment carries within it its own disappearance: “Man dies constantly until the moment of his demise.” Presence and absence, for him, are inseparable: “If Being is presence, it is also at the same time absence or non-presence.” He further elucidates this concept asserting that "Dasein is essentially temporal, stretching itself along its own potentiality-for-being, which includes its own impossibility of being." In essence, our existence unfolds only within the confines of finitude; each current moment is invariably accompanied by its own cessation. The olfactory experience of a perfume serves as an existential microcosm: A perfume’s gradual evaporation becomes a miniature enactment of this existential structure: each fragrant breath is already a farewell.
Which is why it is so hard to let go of a fragrance as if, intimately, it meant letting go of that part of oneself that has clung to this scent. Letting go of a perfume, or not being able to find it anymore, equals letting go of certain parts of ourselves; accepting that some emotions and memories, some voices and faces and moments will forever be doomed to degrade without hope of being resurrected.
Yet, there is no point to holding on to a perfume, for it is programmed to degrade. Should a bottle be kept hidden from the sunlight, in the coldest of rooms, unopened, it would still evolve, its molecules neverendingly interacting with each other so that it would have invariably changed since the moment we first smelt it. That isn’t to say that preserving scents is vain. Such an exercise, rather, I see as being vital, all the more so that our society’s pace has quickened and narrowed, and there are still memories tied to this and to that. It is a priesthood of sorts.
And that is why I also value scarcity, despite the pain it would inevitably cause at the end of the path. It is covenant of sorts: with an art piece, that is a moment. Scarcity demands a certain level of attention, to the beautiful details of life; it demands a spirit of abandon to what life may throw our way and take away from us; it demands a shift in our perception of reality and forces us to cultivate, and cherish, with all our being, that fleeting, ungraspable present moment. Where Heidegger gives us the stakes, Merleau-Ponty gives us the mechanics. He indeed wrote that “with the arrival of every present moment, its predecessor vanishes below the threshold of presentness: to retain it, I must reach through a thin layer of time”. And perfume is precisely the only tool that reveals this layer: “smell, unlike vision or touch, does not present objects as extended things in space but as fleeting, enveloping qualities, or ‘essences’, which appear at once and then dissolve below the horizon of presence.”
The act of smelling thus becomes an active reaching‑through, a subtle negotiation between having and losing. Perfume, in Merleau‑Ponty’s terms, is hermeneutic: we interpret its fleeting signs as they pass, all the while aware that the very medium of interpretation dissolves beneath our grasp, urging us to live perceptually in the ever‑thinning layer of time.
Yet, what if this layer of time were not real? What if that present moment, to one offered, was an artificial construct, a spectacular parody of the living upheld by a liturgy that has neither god, nor priest?
III. Claiming the Genuine Moment
When that covenant is breached, when the present moment we live proves to be mere fabrication, our self ultimately drowns in the “They.” In Heidegger’s terms, this is Verfallenheit, our fallenness into the everyday crowd. Verfallenheit in turn deprives us of the Augenblick, that decisive flash of vision in which we acknowledge our own mortality and, in doing so, seize the singular weight of a moment. By buying into the lie of rarity, thus partaking in the collective ritual set up by a brand for the sake of its sign-value, our choices no longer emerge from the inner voice of conscience but from the echo chamber of collective expectation: we act not because we genuinely will something, but because “one is meant to” in order to belong. The leap into authentic presence is postponed indefinitely, either because it was never real in the first place or because we opt out of it, ironically choosing dupes rather than understanding the value of true scarcity.
Zygmunt Bauman’s portrait of “liquid selves” captures the human cost of this collapse. When our identities are assembled and discarded by market trends, we drift perpetually unsettled and incapable of sustained self-reflection. Anthony Giddens adds that dependence on external validation, whether through consumer tribes or social-media “likes”, blurs the boundary between genuine choice and social compulsion, leaving us too anxious to say “no” when the next perfumed ritual beckons. In that erosion of self-direction, moral agency withers: how can one bear witness to one’s life when every decision feels pre-written by unseen forces?
Ontologically, the wound runs deeper still. Our being-in-the-world, once a seamless field of meaningful engagements, fragments into hollow tokens. Objects no longer disclose their own life; they flicker as commodified spectacles. Time ceases to flow in living durée and instead fractures into a succession of market-driven instants. With the noematic world unspooling into disconnected flashes, our sense of self as a coherent temporal project unravels into a series of interchangeable roles.
Yet even this ontological rupture holds within it the seed of recovery. By recognising the manufactured nature of these staged “nows,” we can refuse the spectacle and reclaim our attention. We can learn again to cherish perfumes whose scarcity is real, to witness their gradual fading not as an affront, but as the very measure of their worth and a mirror to our own finitude. In silent, un-ritualised moments of mindful smelling, we can let each inhalation be a solitary covenant with the present rather than a performance for others. In gatherings devoted to blind discovery rather than brand spectacle, we can forge genuine communitas beyond commerce. And in the simple act of allowing a scarce, really limited bottle to run dry, we can stand before the final drop as before our own end: undaunted, fully present, and profoundly human.
As Zygmunt Bauman warns, we become “liquid selves,” assembled and discarded by market trends, perpetually unsettled and unable to sustain self-reflection. This reliance on external validation – whether consumer tribes or social-media “likes” – blurs the boundary between genuine choice and social compulsion. In practical terms, we lose the courage to stand apart at critical moments, to say “no” to manmade rituals, and abdicate the power to shape our own narratives by claiming for ourselves that which is truly scarce, the present of art and perfume-craft. As our selves shatter into hollow tokens of collective approval, the authentic covenant of genuine scarcity, once our anchor in finitude, floats free, untethered and ultimately worthless.
In the duel of rarity vs. scarcity, the greatest victory is this: choosing presence over performance.