Very Long, but interesting article.
My conclusion is Buy Direct or expect to be duped.
March 2, 2026
I Hired a Lab to Counterfeit-Test a Dozen Suspicious Beauty Products I Bought Online. Every Single One Had a Problem.
Of all the skin-care and cosmetics products I recently bought online that turned out to be counterfeit, expired, used, or otherwise problematic, the one that still makes me squirm is a curiously distended tube of lip gloss.
I’d purchased it from a third-party seller on Amazon because I wanted to find out how, or if, someone could really know that the popular beauty product they bought on the internet was the real thing.
I’d also ordered a second tube of the same product — Rhode Peptide Lip Treatment, one of Wirecutter’s lip gloss picks — from the brand’s official website, Rhode Skin. This latter purchase was my control group, my straight-from-the-source version, my real thing.
From the jump, I found inconsistencies between the two.
The tube that arrived from Amazon was about a quarter-inch longer and a slightly different shade than the one I bought from Rhode. In several places, the labeling wasn’t a word-for-word match; plus, that text had been printed with two different-colored inks. The Amazon version also felt lighter, even though it was the bigger tube, making me wonder if I’d actually received the full 10 milliliters indicated on the label.
And then there was the bloating.
The tube from Amazon appeared slightly puffy and inflated next to the one from Rhode. That discrepancy wasn’t as obvious as the others; in fact, I’m not sure I would have noticed the bloating on my own. But I was working with a cosmetic chemist — Rachel Johnson, founder and chief chemist at The Charismatic Chemist, a cosmetic research and development lab in New Jersey — to compare and analyze my makeup and skin-care purchases, and once she pointed it out, I couldn’t not see it.
“That could suggest microbial growth,” Johnson told me, “or that the formula might be reacting to the packaging.”
Ew.
A few minutes later, Johnson confirmed that the chemical compositions of the two lip treatments were off by a significant amount: a 20% difference between them, according to a spectrometer analysis.
Evaluating suspicious samples alongside verified, authentic products was critical to our testing. We labeled products with green and red stickers to distinguish those bought from authorized sellers (green) versus unauthorized sellers (red). Gabriella DePinho/NYT Wirecutter
All of that meant that the lip gloss I’d bought from the Amazon third-party seller was almost certainly fake. And possibly noxious.
Through a combination of lab testing and expert assessment, we concluded that all 12 of the beauty products I’d purchased from third-party sellers on Amazon, eBay, Shein, and Walmart were either not what they claimed to be or questionable for reasons beyond their authenticity. Johnson went farther, explicitly stating that they were all “definitively identified as counterfeits.”
When I asked these four retailers what they made of our findings, they all stated that they strictly prohibit the sale of counterfeit merchandise from the third-party sellers allowed on their sites. Amazon, eBay, and Shein also said they were investigating the third-party sellers in question. (You can read more of their responses in our section on how not to get scammed.)
I’ve now spent months entrenched in the super-shady, ridiculously confusing, and astonishingly pervasive cesspool of counterfeit beauty products sold online. And I’m here to tell you that, at least in certain corners of the internet, your chances of buying an item that isn’t what you think it is are unfortunately and shockingly high.
Fortunately, you have a few ways to protect yourself.
The items on the right side of each product pairing are our real specimens; their questionable counterparts are all on the left. Michael Murtaugh/NYT Wirecutter and Dana Davis/NYT Wirecutter
Beauty products aren’t the most counterfeited, but they might be the most dangerous
U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized 500,716 counterfeit personal-care items — a category that includes cosmetics, skin care, soap, and toothpaste — during the 2024 fiscal year. That’s peanuts considering how many fake handbags and wallets (5,132,402), fake pharmaceuticals (3,743,413), fake clothing items (1,043,853), fake pairs of sunglasses (771,533), and fake pieces of jewelry (713,036) the agency intercepted over that same time frame.
That figure is even more minuscule compared to the number of bootleg beauty products that aren’t confiscated. Authorities capture less than 2.3% of all counterfeit goods sent to the United States, according to a July 2020 report from the National Association of Manufacturers.
If those 500,716 counterfeit personal-care items represented 2.3% of the fakes arriving stateside, that means another 21,269,544 snuck across the border that same year.
Then there are domestically manufactured fakes, like the $700,000 worth of illegitimate Kylie Cosmetics, MAC, NARS, and Urban Decay products seized by Los Angeles police in a 2018 raid. Authorities were reportedly tipped off by buyers who, not realizing they’d purchased counterfeits, complained to the actual brands about developing bumps and rashes after using “their” products. The fakes were ultimately “found to contain bacteria and human waste,” as LAPD deputy chief Marc Reina later tweeted.
And that’s why counterfeit beauty, even though it represents a small fraction of the fakery out there, is one of the most critical categories to avoid. These are products that go on or in your body, and that can be risky. Over the past two decades, fake personal-care products have been found to contain ingredients like antifreeze (in counterfeit toothpaste as a sweetener, I’m sorry to tell you) and urine (to give a fake fragrance a golden hue, I’m even more sorry to say).
“People go to the hospital because of these products,” Bob Barchiesi, president of the International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition, said in a video interview. “They end up in the emergency room because of them.”
How we set out to test for phony beauty products
To see how easily someone might unwittingly buy bogus beauty items online, I shopped for skin care and makeup just as millions of people do every day: on my phone and laptop, browsing several of the world’s most popular e-retailers.
A big difference, of course, was that I kind of wanted to get scammed. For journalism.
To mitigate that inclination, I looked for third-party storefronts with lots of positive customer reviews and lots of beauty items for sale. I didn’t want to stack the deck by engaging with an obvious swindler or fly-by-night seller (although it seems that one of my eBay sellers has since vanished). I also aimed to approximate the reassurance of finding a seller who’s been doing business for a while and seemingly has plenty of testimonials from happy customers.
Shopping for my potentially suspicious samples was perhaps the trickiest part of my research. I tried to mimic the steps that someone might take when feeling uncertain about the trustworthiness of a particular product listing. For example, I allowed myself a Google search on “how to avoid counterfeit beauty online” and read up on some caveats — but I also made a few purchases that ran counter to the advice I found, since people often do their online shopping on the fly. NYT Wirecutter; source data by The Charismatic Chemist
I focused exclusively on third-party sellers who listed through big online marketplaces. Defined broadly by Amazon as “independent sellers who offer a variety of new, used, and refurbished items,” third-party sellers are legion. They’re responsible for 17.4% of sales on Shein, more than 60% of Amazon’s sales, 95% of all products listed on Walmart.com, and virtually all of eBay’s sales.
They’re also frequently called “unauthorized sellers,” because in many cases they haven’t been officially approved by a brand to sell its merchandise, according to the retail-intelligence platform Wiser. For example, I easily purchased that puffy tube of Rhode lip gloss off Amazon even though Rhode does not list Amazon as an authorized sales channel on its FAQ page. When you purchase Rhode-labeled products via a third party, the company says, it “cannot guarantee that you’re buying genuine products or vouch for their authenticity, quality, or condition.”
Even when platforms such as Amazon or Walmart have an authorized partnership with a brand, that brand’s products might still be available on those same sites via unauthorized, third-party sellers, which can be confusing even for knowledgeable shoppers. For example, if you’re looking to buy CeraVe products on Amazon, you can do so via the brand’s official Amazon store — but if you search Amazon for a specific CeraVe product and filter your search results by “Seller,” you may surface some third-party options that do not meet CeraVe’s standards for authenticity, as noted on the company’s FAQ page.
As common as third-party sales are, they’re unfortunately the method through which much counterfeit merchandise is moved online. About 43% of goods purchased from third-party sellers on popular e-commerce platforms, including 13 out of 13 cosmetics products, were found to be counterfeit in a 2018 report from the United States Government Accountability Office.
In the beauty industry, first-party sellers and authorized retailers include brick-and-mortar Sephora stores, Ulta locations, and department stores, as well as those retailers’ digital storefronts. (Ulta now invites select brands to drop-ship through its Ulta Beauty Marketplace, but it isn’t open to third-party sellers, per a company statement.) Such retailers provide “well-designed, well-thought-out supply chains,” Zac Rogers, an associate professor of supply chain management at Colorado State University, said in a video interview. The supply chains typically involve moving goods straight from Point A to Point B, so their custody and provenance are relatively guaranteed.
A third-party chain, however, might move inventory from questionable origins or include who-knows-how-many intermediaries en route to the final customer, remaining open to vulnerabilities. “If I’m seven steps removed from the manufacturer, I don’t know if something was stolen,” Rogers said. “I also have to find out on my own if there has been a recall, because everything is so ad hoc. There’s all sorts of weird things that can happen.”
First-party supply chains are largely defined by a lack of variables: Brands send the merchandise they manufacture directly to retailers. Third-party chains can be much longer and murkier, as products can be sourced through liquidation (overstock, returns, closeouts), and their ownership may change across several product brokers before they are offered for sale. With so many handoff points in this chain, counterfeits have a much better shot of sneaking in. Dana Davis/NYT Wirecutter
Our test results — and why we don’t trust the products we got from third parties
Overall, I purchased 12 beauty products from third-party sellers. That includes three products for which I ordered two suspicious versions, simply because more than one listing caught my eye.
I also bought those same products from the brands’ own websites (which, by default, are authorized, first-party sellers). These items served as my control specimens, against which we compared our third-party samples.
I sent all of my purchases to Johnson, the cosmetic chemist in New Jersey, who conducted a series of tests to compare our controls with our more suspicious samples.
To assess chemical similarities and differences between the products, Johnson relied on a Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectrometer. Frequently used for quality control or material authentication, an FTIR shoots a laser at a substance and provides a breakdown of what’s inside. It can’t spit out a word-for-word ingredient list, but it can determine the number of ingredients in a substance and (depending on the complexity of the mixture) the concentration of each as a percentage of the overall mixture.
It can also compare results from two separate substances and produce a percentage match. The lower that percentage, the more likely that the two substances are different — or, for our purposes, that one is a spurious version of the other. Analyzing with FTIR involves some margin of error, so Johnson told me that she would want to see a 95% match or higher between an authorized product and its unauthorized counterpart to call the latter “real.”
Only three of our 12 samples — two bottles of Drunk Elephant glycolic serums and a Dior concealer — surpassed that 95% benchmark.
Because there are no precise rules for exactly how fake a product should appear to be before it can be deemed definitely fake, I cross-checked our results with Andrew Koenig, a technical and formulation consultant at CosChemist Consulting in California. He said that a sample could receive as low as an 80% to 90% FTIR match against its real counterpart and still wind up being a legitimate product. (Johnson had mentioned that other chemists might accept an 80% match as authentic. Again, there’s no industry standard.)
By that 80% minimum, five of our 12 samples would be definitively counterfeit. This group included a supposed Nars concealer that was only a 2% match to its authentic counterpart and two alleged bottles of Charlotte Tilbury Airbrush Flawless Setting Spray that got FTIR readings of 21% and 25% compared with the real thing. Four other samples’ FTIR results fell into the 80% to 90% range.
Johnson also employed a 14-point sensory analysis that she uses when formulating “dupes,” which is when a legitimate brand intentionally produces a product similar to one that’s already on the market. For the sensory analysis, Johnson graded each product’s opacity, shine, tackiness, absorption, and similar qualities on a scale from 0 to 10 and then compared the two outcomes.
None of our suspect samples, including those with high FTIR percentage matches, matched its authentic counterpart on all 14 points. In combination with the spectrometer testing and packaging-discrepancy observations, this analysis helped solidify Johnson’s conclusion that all of my third-party products were counterfeit.
For example: Our Amazon-purchased sample of Rhode Peptide Lip Treatment was an 80% FTIR match to its real counterpart. But in addition to all of the peculiarities we saw on the packaging, as well as the potential bacteria lurking inside, we could easily tell just by seeing what came out of each tube that something was different. The real Rhode balm looked opaque, while the other substance looked translucent.
The Rhode Peptide Lip Treatment that I bought from an Amazon third-party seller earned an FTIR percentage match of 80% to its authentic counterpart. That figure could be regarded as a maybe-fake-maybe-not indicator, according to experts I spoke to. But other discrepancies in the product and the packaging, noticeable to the naked eye, led us to believe that we were likely dealing with a counterfeit. Michael Murtaugh/NYT Wirecutter and Hannah Schwob for NYT Wirecutter
Another example: A tub of supposed Drunk Elephant Protini Polypeptide Cream from eBay achieved an 83% match. But that sample was noticeably more yellow in tone, had a glassier shine (almost as if the product was separating a bit), and did not form peaks as stiff as what we got from the Protini Polypeptide Cream I’d purchased on Drunk Elephant’s website.
The Drunk Elephant Protini Polypeptide Cream that I got on eBay came in a 30 mL package, which I did not find available for purchase on the brand’s website. However, when I bought a larger size of this cream from Drunk Elephant’s site as our authentic sample, I received a 30 mL container as a freebie with purchase (which I then submitted for testing). At first, I naively thought that whoever had sold this size on eBay was simply trying to make a little money from their authentic freebie. After our testing, however, it became evident that both the packaging and the cream itself were off in several subtle ways. Michael Murtaugh/NYT Wirecutter and Hannah Schwob for NYT Wirecutter
Even when a suspected fake earned an outstanding FTIR match percentage, there were reasons for skepticism.
I bought two bottles of another Drunk Elephant product, T.L.C. Framboos Glycolic Night Serum, from a Walmart third-party seller and an eBay third-party seller. Both samples were a 97% FTIR match to the real thing.
Johnson, however, said that glycolic acid’s molecular structure is rather simple, so even something with a 97% FTIR match might be an inauthentic copycat. (Koenig agreed about the molecular structure but still said that a 97% match was likely not counterfeit.) Additionally, Johnson detected differences in the packaging that led her to believe that the ones I’d purchased via third party might be illegitimate: On the boxes that these serums came in, for example, the lot codes had been stamped in slightly different locations with what appeared to be different marking technologies. (I asked Drunk Elephant if it could confirm any changes in how it printed lot codes but did not receive a response before publication.)
Because packaging differences were a consistent tell across many of my purchases, I also asked Elizabeth Carey Smith, a branding and typography designer in New York, to examine photos we’d taken of our real and maybe-not-real packages and weigh in. Although Smith said she was “very surprised at how close some of these things are,” she pointed out several inconsistencies, including some bits of heavier typeface on the T.L.C. Framboos Glycolic Night Serum boxes, which could indicate that they were “probably using an image [of the legitimate packaging] or scanning it.”
Other smoking guns may have been hiding online. The eBay seller who sent me one of those Drunk Elephant serums has seemingly disappeared in the four-ish months since I placed my order, which certainly doesn’t instill confidence. Meanwhile, the Walmart seller who sent me the other has received at least 10 one-star customer reviews for a variety of items since December 1, 2025, peppered with claims like “This is not an authentic product,” “This seller is selling knockoff perfumes,” “The description and the pictures do not match the product,” and “I see you did [a] bait and switch.”
Something I realized while looking into bootleg packaging “tells” is that buyers often concoct narratives in their heads about why a product appears a certain way. For instance, someone might look at the CeraVe box that contains both English and French and just assume it came from Canada. Or they might notice that the white part of the package is more off-white and figure it’s okay, just a bit older. But both of the boxes at left are suspicious and possibly indicators of a counterfeit product. Michael Murtaugh/NYT Wirecutter
My most confounding specimen was a package of SkinCeuticals C E Ferulic serum. The sample I bought from a Walmart third-party seller had an “e-mark,” a quality-assurance emblem from the European Union, which made me wonder if we were dealing with someone who had traveled to Paris, loaded up a suitcase with serums, and come home to turn a quick buck. (Then again, the e-mark could just be fake, perhaps added to the packaging to make me think the item had come from Europe.)
Compared with an identical serum I purchased from the SkinCeuticals site, the one from Walmart registered as a 90% FTIR match — right on the cusp of what may be considered legitimate, according to Koenig (but not Johnson). But the colors of the two serums were significantly different: The one from the SkinCeuticals site was pale yellow, while the e-mark sample looked orange. The latter shade, as experienced vitamin C serum users may know, typically indicates that the product has oxidized, which renders it less potent.
The SkinCeuticals serum I purchased from a third-party seller on Walmart was especially tricky to analyze. The “e-mark” on the label suggests that it came from the European market. L’Oreal (which owns SkinCeuticals) tested that sample and told me that it was legit and that the European formula differs in color from the US formula. Michael Murtaugh/NYT Wirecutter and Hannah Schwob for NYT Wirecutter
When I contacted L’Oreal, the parent company of SkinCeuticals, for comment, it offered to retest my third-party-purchased sample. I hand-delivered it to the company in New York. L’Oreal claimed it was legit, telling me that the European version is darker in color even when it’s fresh. For what it’s worth, both Johnson and Koenig were skeptical of that claim: As Koenig put it, “No one’s gonna say that their product is oxidizing.”
According to other experts I spoke to, no one’s gonna say that their product is counterfeit, either.
Although brands may work diligently behind the scenes to thwart bad actors who are making or selling fakes based on their intellectual property, admitting publicly that fakes are floating around out there is something that’s rarely done. I learned this firsthand when I contacted the eight beauty brands whose products my testing encompassed. None would grant me an interview (including L’Oreal, which shared those serum-testing results through a spokesperson).
“The bottom line is, [companies] don’t want their brand affiliated with counterfeit goods,” Barchiesi, of the International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition, said. “They don’t want to scare the consumers.” Harley Lewin, an intellectual-property lawyer renowned for his raids on fake-handbag operations, similarly told me, “It’s very easy to get drawn into a debate that you can’t win. That debate being that all of your stuff out there on the market, legitimately or not … is fake.”
In the end, if there really was nothing wrong with that third-party SkinCeuticals serum, all I could think was “How ironic.” Because if you’re a regular user of the North American version of the serum, and you decide to roll the dice on a third-party purchase to save (in my case) about $60, you might look at what you get in the mail and, if it’s like my sample, you may quickly surmise that it’s fake, expired, or otherwise suspicious — when, apparently, you actually won the third-party-seller lottery and found a true bargain, a legit product that you could use with confidence.
But you’d probably just throw it away.
How to shop online for beauty products (or other stuff) and not get scammed
When I reached out for comment on my findings, Amazon, eBay, Shein, and Walmart all expressed a zero-tolerance policy with regard to counterfeit products.
An Amazon spokesperson called out “proactive measures” that are meant to prevent counterfeit products from being listed.
An eBay spokesperson said that it uses “seller compliance audits, block filter algorithms, and AI-supported monitoring by our team of in-house specialists” to proactively remove potentially counterfeit and prohibited items.
A Shein spokesperson cited its Anti-Counterfeiting and Intellectual Property Infringement Policy, which prohibits the sale of counterfeit products.
And Walmart said it’s “investing in tools and technology to help ensure only trusted, legitimate items are available on our site.”
But none of that seems to be enough. Even if these platforms are trying to stymie bad actors, it’s still distressingly easy to buy fake products inadvertently, and even smart and savvy consumers regularly fall prey.
What I’m watching