This viral brand creates dupes of your faves, from Charlotte Tilbury to rhode, here's what to buy to save £££
It's why I've had a one-sided beef with MCo Beauty for a while. The Australian brand is a viral hit on the likes of TikTok and use packaging and product names that are really, really similar (like, painfully so) to bestselling products that we know and love; from the rhode Lip Peptide Treatments to Milk Makeup Hydro Grip, Dior Blush and the Charlotte Tilbury Hollywood Flawless Filter – in fact they have a lot of Tilbury 'dupes'.
Up until now, I've just watched on from afar as the brand wasn't available in the UK, but from today (21st of July) , the range is dropping in Superdrug. So, before you flock to buy the products (which are all under £15), I put some of the 'dupes' to the test.
The brand says: 'The MCoBeauty FLAWLESS GLOW LUMINOUS SKIN FILTER is a 4-in-1, multi-tasking, skin booster designed to give your skin the ultimate glowing filter-like finish! This versatile formula is designed to be worn alone for a lightweight subtle glow, under makeup as a luminous primer, mixed with foundation to add a light-reflecting glow, or on top of makeup as highlighter.'
A 'dupe' of: Charlotte Tilbury Hollywood Flawless Filter
Is it a dupe? Yes
Our review: Looking past how shamelessly the packaging dupes our queen Char Tilbs, I cannot deny how good this skin filter is. It gives the same luminous glow and blurring effect that we know and love from the original, at a snip of the price. It's also really comparable to e.l.f.'s Halo Glow.
The brand says: 'MCoBeauty PEPTIDE LIP TREATMENT combines conditioning and colour in a lip-glazing cream-oil formula. It has a non-sticky but sumptuous texture, providing your pout with the perfect amount of cushioning and plumpness with a glossy wash of colour.'
A 'dupe' of: rhode Peptide Tint
Is it a dupe? Yes
Our review: Considering that rhode has had a little bit of online backlash on the graininess of some of their famous lip peptide treatment colours (which they have since addressed and reformulated), I'd say this balm/gloss hybrid is a great alternative. It's almost a gel-like feel as it glides onto the lips and doesn't have any stickiness or gloopiness, and the pigment is impressive and lasts (event through a recent dental treatment) I've been reaching for this over my other balms recently.
The brand says: 'A 2-in-1 foundation and skincare powerhouse, the MCoBeauty MIRACLE FLAWLESS SKIN FOUNDATION has a creamy formula that evens skin's texture with buildable, medium coverage. The skin-nourishing ingredients help give boost moisture retention while smoothing and comforting skin. A fusion of Hyaluronic Acid and Coconut Water is blended with Rose Flower Water to work over time to revitalise skin's texture.'
A 'dupe' of: Charlotte Tilbury Beautiful Skin Foundation
Is it a dupe? Yes (but with a caveat)
Our review: God's honest truth? I'm not a fan of the Charlotte Tilbury Beautiful Skin Foundation. As an oily/combo girl, it's too dewy for me, and this foundation is exactly the same. The skin-nourishing nature of this trumps the foundation ability in my opinion, so within a few hours, I was shinier than a lighthouse at night. Oily gals, this is a miss, but drier skin types might like it.
The brand says: 'MCoBeauty GRIP ILLUMINATING PRIMER is a gel formula that helps you prepare your skin for makeup application and adds a natural-looking, soft-focus glow.'
A 'dupe' of: Milk Hydrogrip Primer
Is it a dupe? No
Our review: The texture of this is really similar to Milk Makeup's hero product and layers well under makeup, but honestly, this didn't work for me to help my makeup last longer, and I looked shiny by lunchtime.
The brand says: 'MCoBeauty's XTENDLASH TUBING MASCARA is our best-selling, award-winning innovative tubing mascara maximising length, curl and volume without flaking or smudging. The formula creates water-resistant 'tubes' around each and every lash for maximum length, definition and hold.'
A 'dupe' of: Glossier Lash Slick
Is it a dupe? Yes
Our review: I really like this tubing mascara. The brush is different to the Glossier mascara (which is plastic) but grabs every lash and lengthens without clumping. It melts off easily while cleansing. Some reviews say that it stings, and I haven't found that at all.
The brand says: 'The MCoBeauty HIGHLIGHT & GLOW BEAUTY WAND is the perfect illuminating liquid highlighter wand to achieve gorgeously glowing skin in a flash!'
A 'dupe' of: Charlotte Tilbury Beauty Light Wand
Is it a dupe? No
Our review: I like this product, but I found it's not as creamy as the CT Beauty Light Wands. It feels a bit stiffer to blend in, however the lasting power is pretty good. In this case, the quality aligns with the lower price point.
The brand says: 'The secret to achieving flawless makeup looks! MCoBeauty MIRACLE FLAWLESS SETTING SPRAY is a multi-purpose setting spray that perfects your makeup while moisturising your skin.'
A 'dupe' of: Charlotte Tilbury Airbrush Flawless Filter Setting Spray
Is it a dupe? No
Our review: Sadly, while it had a nice misting action, this did not set one iota of my makeup. To me, it could literally have been water in a misting bottle as I looked shiny within an hour of doing my makeup. Super disappointing.
The brand says: 'The MCoBeauty XTENDBROWS SHAPE & SCULPT PENCIL is a long-wearing and pigmented formula that fills in sparse brows with natural hair-like strokes. The nourishing formula is infused with Castor Oil and B5 to help condition and support the growth of brow hairs, while the precise triangle tip is perfect for creating natural hairlike strokes.'
A 'dupe' of: Kosas Brow Pop Pencil
Is it a dupe? No
Our review: I'm a big fan of the Kosas brow pencil, and the defining (ahem) feature that sets it apart from other brands is the super thin pencil nib – this formula doesn't have this. The pencil is creamy and applies smoothly to the skin with no pulling, but it doesn't grip onto the skin and wears away easily, so it's not one to wear to the gym.
The brand says: 'MCoBeauty MIRACLE FLAWLESS PRESSED POWDER LIGHT a makeup finishing powder to perfect your makeup looks. It leaves your skin feeling smooth and velvety with a soft appearance.'
A 'dupe' of: Charlotte Tilbury Airbrush Flawless Finish Powder
Is it a dupe? No
Our review: This is a really lovely, finely-milled pressed powder, but doesn't have the je ne sais quoi of the beloved Tilbs powder. It works well for emergency touch-ups but as a setting powder, I found that the shine peeked through within a few hours.
The brand says: 'MCoBeauty BROW LAMINATE SCULPT & SET is the ultimate fusion of gel and wax that helps to style your brows'
A 'dupe' of: REFY Brow Sculpt
Is it a dupe? Yes
Our review: Take away the pink colour of the packaging and you have the spitting image of Brow Sculpt. I do really like the formula of this one too, it set my brows all day and didn't leave them flaky or crispy.
Keeks Reid is the Beauty Director at Cosmopolitan UK. While she loves all things beauty, Keeks is a hair fanatic through and through. She started her career in beauty journalism in 2013 as editorial assistant at Blackhair and Hair magazines working her way to Acting Editor of Blackhair magazine at 23 years old. She spent much of her career working in trade hairdressing media at Hairdressers Journal, Salon International and the British Hairdressing Awards. Which is why she is a regular contributor to Cosmo's Curl Up franchise. Now, alongside her Cosmo work, she presents, creates content on social media and works with a range of beauty companies; from magazines and websites to beauty brands and salons.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Business Insider
2 minutes ago
- Business Insider
Inside the 12 hours it took for an awkward moment at a Coldplay concert to go viral
The Coldplay kiss cam video shows how fast someone's 15 seconds of fame can ricochet around the world. The clip caught a tech CEO and his head of HR embracing and led to the chief's resignation Here's a play-by-play of how the scandal unfolded — and why it caught so much attention. By now, we've all seen the Coldplay kiss cam fiasco. What happened in the hours and days afterward is a case study in how fast someone's 15 seconds of fame (or infamy) can truly ricochet around the world. A tech CEO and his HR head were caught embracing on the jumbotron at Gillette Stadium. They looked horrified and quickly untangled, with the woman turning away and the man dodging the camera. Front man Chris Martin suggested they could be having an affair. The fleeting moment — a fraction of a nightly segment during which Martin addresses various members of the audience — stuck with some concertgoers. In the early morning hours following the show, at least a few took to the internet to post about it. A Reddit user who said they attended the show asked if anyone else was wondering about the couple. One TikTok user said Martin had caught "a couple having an affair" at the show, and another said that they were "constantly refreshing the TikTok search in hopes that someone recorded the couple caught red-handed at the Coldplay concert tonight." They were in luck. Grace Springer, who had fewer than 15,000 TikTok followers at the time, had been recording in the hopes of landing on the jumbotron herself and capturing the moment. Shortly before 1 a.m. ET on Thursday, she posted a 15-second clip on TikTok captioned "trouble in paradise??" "In the moment when I filmed it, I didn't think much of it," Springer, who didn't respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, said during an interview on the British daytime program "This Morning." "But it wasn't until after the concert, where I was debriefing the moment with my friends, and I said, 'Let's review the footage, let's see if it really looks that bad.' And I think it does." Then the algorithm did its thing, pushing the video onto For You pages the world over. The TikTok spread like wildfire. It didn't take long for internet sleuths to identify the pair as Andy Byron, the then-CEO of tech upstart Astronomer, and Kristin Cabot, Astronomer's head of HR. Their names came up in the comments of Springer's TikTok video, though it was unclear who was the first to recognize them because the platform doesn't display the timestamp of comments. By 3 a.m., two hours after Springer posted the video, people were starting to look them up by name, according to data from Google Trends, which monitors search volume. The story had changed from an awkward interaction to a corporate scandal. Soon, people all over the world — from Ireland to Singapore — would know their names. "It's really sort of as we're waking up into the day on the 17th, where we see it start to spread," Molly Dwyer, the head of insights for social media monitoring company Peak Metrics, told Business Insider. The amateur internet sleuths then deployed their talents to find the pair's social profiles and those of Byron's wife. Commenters began bombarding Byron and Cabot's profiles, as well as those of Astronomer, which had turned off the ability to comment on posts across channels by Thursday afternoon Meme accounts had a heyday. "That's sort of the bread and butter of clickbait content — laughing at people's poor decisions — and the fact that then it plays into an anti-corporate element just further fanned the flames," Dwyer said. He noted that there has been an uptick in interest in content that is opposed to CEOs. "It was sort of a perfect storm of things that are really viral on social media right now, all coming together." Storyful, a social-media research company, used ticket stubs and raw footage from Springer to corroborate she was at the concert, according to John Hall, an editor for the site. One by one, mainstream news organizations around the world started covering the story. The online chatter kicked into high gear later on Thursday. Peak Metrics tracked 30,000 X posts in the 11 a.m. hour. Byron's name had been Googled more than 2 million times by that afternoon, and more than $65,000 was traded on Polymarket about his chances of remaining as CEO and predictions about his marital status. Brands like Netflix and Nando's jumped in, posting reactions to the clip or commenting on Springer's videos on social media. Think pieces about the surveillance state, sachenfreude, corporate America, and Coldplay proliferated. The saga shows how quickly a single moment can take on a life of its own in the social media age — a lesson others have learned before. While it seemed everyone had something to say, the pair at the center of it all stayed silent. (A fake apology from Byron that quoted the Coldplay song "Fix You" spread on Thursday afternoon before the company said it wasn't real.) Astronomer, a then little-known data startup, broke the silence on Friday with a statement that said the board was investigating the matter. Later that day, Byron was placed on leave. By Saturday, he'd resigned, and one of the company's cofounders, Pete DeJoy, had taken his place. The company found a silver lining in the scandal. "The events of the past few days have received a level of media attention that few companies—let alone startups in our small corner of the data and AI world—ever encounter," DeJoy wrote in a LinkedIn post on Monday. "The spotlight has been unusual and surreal for our team and, while I would never have wished for it to happen like this, Astronomer is now a household name." As with any viral moment, the attention was fleeting — and one that must've caught Coldplay off guard, too. "We'd like to say hello to some of you in the crowd," Martin said on Saturday, when the band took the stage for the first time since Wednesday's concert. Then a warning: "We're going to use our cameras and put some of you on the big screen. If you haven't done your makeup, do your makeup now."
New York Post
34 minutes ago
- New York Post
Groom's comment on wedding day divides social media
An Aussie groom dropping the F-word while giving a glowing compliment towards his beautiful bride has divided social media. Entrepreneur James Hachem, who is a founder of the skincare brand Alya Skin and clothing brand Sasha Therese, wed social media influencer Antonia Apostolou in a lavish ceremony in Italy in June. The wedding, which has been posted on both the bride and groom's social media accounts, is completely over-the-top and beautiful. The bride wore a classic white gown with a stunning veil, and the groom looked dapper in a black and white suit. The influencer, in true influencer fashion, shared a snippet of their vows on her TikTok account, where she has over 4 million likes and more than 100,000 followers. @antoniahachem Aussies in the middle of their elegant Italian ceremony ♬ original sound – antoniahachem 'Aussies in the middle of their elegant Italian wedding,' she jokingly captioned the clip. The video then showed Hachem, who was featured on the Forbes' 30 Under 30 list in 2021, disrupting their vows to take a moment to gush about his new bride. 'F–k me does she not look insane?' he asked the wedding guests. Apostolou, who has already changed her name to Hachem on social media, was seen laughing at her groom's grand statement, and the crowd also laughed along, clapping and cheering. James Hachem and Antonia Apostolou's wedding was in June. @antoniahachem/TikTok The ceremony then started and the groom appeared to be overcome with emotions as the marriage celebrant began to speak. That 7-word remark quickly divided people online, amassing over 500,000 views in the process. Some people absolutely loved Hachem's cheeky remark, with one person branding it 'gold' and another stating, 'you married the right man'. 'Best moment,' someone else said. 'He was nervous and blurted out what he thinks. Kind of cute,' another theorised. 'I feel like this could be a red flag but weird because I sort of like it too,' one person wrote, with another saying, 'this or nothing'. Someone else argued that you can tell the Aussies from the non-Aussies in the comment section based on how 'foul' they find the use of swear words. 'Can't get more Aussie than this,' another declared. Hachem's reaction to his bride was posted on TikTok and went viral. @antoniahachem/TikTok On the other hand, there were other people who weren't as sold on his choice of phrasing, particularly the fact that he dropped a swear word in the middle of his wedding ceremony. 'That ruined the classy moment,' one person claimed. 'I would be mortified,' someone else said. 'I would die of embarrassment,' another wrote. One person said the video was 'proof money can't buy class', with another branding the move 'bogan'. Another person argued it was 'disrespectful' to make those kinds of remarks in front of the bride's family. Someone else said it was 'vulgar', while one claimed it gave her the 'ick'.
Boston Globe
3 hours ago
- Boston Globe
What is dirty soda and where can you try it?
Zhuzhed-up sodas are nothing new. As a college student, I had the deep pleasure of living above a drugstore with an old-school soda fountain, where I ordered Green Rivers, cherry phosphates, and vanilla Cokes while listening to farmers in from the fields jaw over 5 cent cups of Butter-Nut coffee. Places like this are a dying breed. Swig and its ilk are the modern version, so of course dirty sodas have gone viral. Get Winter Soup Club A six-week series featuring soup recipes and cozy vibes, plus side dishes and toppings, to get us all through the winter. Enter Email Sign Up It happened because, at the tail end of the year 2021, singer Olivia Rodrigo posted a photo of herself — black hat, black leather jacket, black nails, in the black night — holding a white cup splashed with a cherry red Swig logo. TikTok exploded. There are now countless reels of people explaining dirty soda, taste-testing dirty soda, and hacking their own dirty soda at home. Advertisement But it was inevitable. With the 2024 debut of Hulu's 'The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,' a reality show for people so obsessed with drama they want to spend their free time watching someone else's, dirty sodas got an even bigger moment. In Advertisement Dirty sodas at Far Out Ice Cream in Brookline. From left: the Creamsicle (orange soda with condensed milk, vanilla, and cream topping), Shark Attack (lemon-lime soda with strawberry drizzle, blue raspberry, and cream), and Kookaberry Cola (cola with strawberry-raspberry-blueberry drizzle plus cream). Devra First In these parts, dirty sodas are hard to come by. They are slowly trickling our way. At But the truest dirty soda experience in these parts can be found in Clinton, where last year Lauren Nanof and her husband, Chris, opened 'I grew up in Clinton, I went to schools in Clinton, and I always had this idea of a little soda shop in our town, a place people could gather,' Nanof says. She was thinking of milkshakes and floats and the like. Then came dirty soda. She and Chris tried making their own. They loved it. She researched and realized there was nothing like it around. There's a Dairy Queen in town, and ice cream stand standouts like Rota Spring Farm and Kimball Farm in the area. Dirty soda was a niche, albeit a risk: Did enough people know what it was? Advertisement First they opened the candy shop. In designing The Fountain, Nanof made the most of her skills from her previous business, specializing in cabinet finishing and interior painting. The result is a candy-colored charmer, with striped walls, ice cream paraphernalia, neon signs, and a Barbie-pink payphone small children stare at with confusion. The soda and ice cream side of the business opened in October, coinciding nicely with 'Secret Lives of Mormon Wives' streaming fervor. There is also a mobile soda cart Nanof and crew bring to events. 'I knew it was going to be good to introduce people to dirty soda, but I never realized what a community aspect it would bring,' Nanof says. 'It's so many people's favorite place to come. We're on a bus stop, so we get flooded after school with people coming in to sit. Grandparents or parents bring kids. It's so nice to see people sit down and share a drink together.' The Fountain hosts all kinds of events, from music and movie Mondays with themed menus to community fund-raisers. When they post a drink on social media, everyone comes in and orders it. Advertisement Customers flock to The Fountain for dirty sodas, ice cream treats, and a social experience. David L Ryan/ Globe Staff I can see why. Dirty sodas aren't a gimmick. They are genuinely delightful. On a recent visit, I order a flight of four small sodas for $12.50, a merciful option for the indecisive and dirty soda curious alike. Some of the offerings are too sweet for my taste (fie on you, Cooler Than a Colada), but I would happily drink concoctions like The Founder (Dr. Pepper with vanilla syrup and coconut creamer) and the Creamy Cola Crush (Coke with sweet cream, raspberry puree, and fresh lime juice) any day. Maybe it's because I'm a whiskey/amaro person, but the brown soda options seem to work better than those with a Sprite/Fresca/Mountain Dew base. There are more than 40 dirty sodas on The Fountain's menu, not to mention all the floats, shakes, soft-serve, stackers (ice cream and toppings layered in a cup), and outliers like The Fountain looks as if it's always been here on High Street in Clinton. David L Ryan/ Globe Staff 'Our downtown, at one point previously to me being alive, was bustling,' says Nanof, who is also president of the chamber of commerce. Now Clinton is being Advertisement And so a soda trend born from Utah's Mormon culture 15 years ago helps contribute to the revitalization of an old Massachusetts mill town today. Talk about the butterfly effect. Or, as we call it now, the Internet. If it means delicious drinks for everyone everywhere, I'll take it. The Fountain, 138 High St., Clinton, 978-878-1615, . Dirty sodas $3.25-$4.50. Devra First can be reached at
