February 2025
Colts GM says Anthony Richardson will face ‘open competition’ for starting QB job next season
Richardson got both hurt and benched last season. Can he turn his career around in Year 3?
MLB 26-and-under power rankings: Evaluating the young talent in all 30 organizations
The Phillies come in last in our 2025 rankings. The No. 1 team will be revealed later this week.
MLB 26-and-under power rankings: Evaluating the young talent in all 30 organizations
The Phillies come in last in our 2025 rankings. The No. 1 team will be revealed later this week.
Boeing No. 2 executive’s role narrowed to focus on fixing commercial plane unit
The Best Sites to Find Affordable Dupes
We may earn a commission from links on this page.
We’ve all been there: You find the perfect product, the chair or skin cream that will solve all your problems through the liberal application of capitalism—but it doesn’t fit into your budget. You have three choices: You can spend the next few months (years?) saving diligently toward the glorious day when you can afford to pull the trigger; you can put that purchase on a credit card and deal with the interest charges—or you can find a dupe.
Dupes—short for “duplicates”—are having their moment. While knockoffs are nothing new, as anyone who has ever bought a “designer” handbag on the streets of New York City can attest, dupes are a little different. Knockoffs are trying to fool people that they’re the name-brand product, but dupes are their own thing—they’re not pretending to be the expensive item, they just replicate its look and function at a lower price point.
Finding dupes can be as easy as a Google image search or a quick trip to Target or Lidl—but it can sometimes be a challenge. Thankfully, there are a variety of apps you can use that make locating dupes a lot easier, and companies that make their own dupes for specific items.
How to scour the web for dupes
If you’re looking for duplicate furniture and housewares, you could spend hours digging through subreddits and Facebook pages, but luckily there tools and sites that make it a lot easier. Some of the most useful include:
-
TikTok. The social media behemoth is kind of dupe central these days. You can type the name of what you’re looking for with hashtags like #dupe or #dupefinder to see what’s out there. What’s good about using TikTok is that most of the results will show people actually using and discussing the dupes, which can help you figure out if they’re truly worth buying.
-
Dupe.com has been getting a lot of press of late thanks to the love it gets from social media. Its interface is pretty simple: You paste in the URL of an item (furniture, housewares, or clothing) or drag an image into the search bar, and Dupe searches the internet for lookalikes. For example, if you want an Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman from Herman Miller—which sells for anywhere from $6,000 to $8,000 new—Dupe.com quickly leads you to Walmart, where you can buy this leather lounge chair with a very similar look and vibe. (There’s also an app.)
-
Spoken.io works very similarly: Paste in a URL or drag/upload a photo, and it will scan the web and point you to a list of discounted dupes. For example, it turned up this $1,899 Eames-like chair—not quite as cheap as the Walmart version, but still a significant savings over the original.
-
Dupeshop focuses on skincare and makeup products, and it doesn’t just point you at purchase links—it pulls together detailed comparisons, reviews, videos, and other information so you can feel confident that the dupe product will perform as expected.
-
SkinSkool distinguishes itself by offering a list of potential dupes organized by a similarity score and labeled with a dollar sign icon indicating how expensive the dupe is. This makes it easy to cross-reference your budget with the available options. The site explicitly states that it bases its choices solely on the publicly available ingredient lists of the products, so it doesn’t offer any kind of hands-on review.
A few companies that make their own dupes
Some companies have made a name for themselves because they make and sell their own high-quality dupes, so you don’t have to search the entire internet trying to find them. A few examples include:
-
Brandefy was founded to exploit the fact that name-brand beauty and skincare products at every price point are largely manufactured in the same facilities using the same ingredients. It creates “inspired by” products that are often indistinguishable from the pricier versions. Brandefy is more oriented toward its app than the website, however, so it’s a good choice if you want to check something on your phone while you’re out shopping.
-
The Essence Vault and Dossier both offer up perfume dupes. Perfumes are expensive to develop, to manufacture, and to package—but you can’t actually copyright a fragrance, so dupe perfumes tend to be uncannily like the expensive brand they’re copying. That being said, you may notice a quality difference between the good stuff and the dupes. But if your budget is dupe-sized, both The Essence Vault and Dossier offer scents explicitly inspired by designer fragrances (Dossier also sells their own original scents).
-
Element Brooklyn offers soaps, lotions, and other products that dupe brands like Aesop or Le Labo with an environmentally friendly twist: Its products are refillable, so you aren’t dumping plastic bottles into landfills all the time.
-
Quince takes the same approach as Brandefy, but for clothing, claiming to use the same factories and manufacturers as the high-end luxury brands it’s replicating.
-
Italic is a Los Angeles-based company that sells clothing, jewelry, and accessories that closely resemble luxury brands. Its prices aren’t as low as literal dupes, but you can still find fashion that looks just like the top-tier brands at a much lower cost.
Some caveats to keep in mind
Keep in mind that it can be difficult to judge whether a dupe is going to be worth buying even at a drastically lower price point. It can be very difficult to tell from a photo whether a piece of furniture or clothing is going to be anywhere near the quality of the real thing, for example. That’s where apps like TikTok that offer endorsements from folks who have actually used the dupes can be super valuable.
Another option for doing your dupe due diligence on beauty and skincare products is SkinSort, which has a useful comparison tool. You can compare a dupe to the brand it’s replicating and SkinSort will show you a list of ingredients in each (along with explanations for what each does) and reviews from people who have actually used the dupe.
Finally, if you want to save some money without risking a downgraded experience, you can also look for name-brand items at secondhand places like Poshmark, which sells clothes, skincare, perfume, and beauty products. A lot of sellers on these platforms have access to name-brand stuff (some work for retailers where they get deep discounts, giving them room for resell profits, for example—look for folks who have a lot of a specific product on hand and you’re probably looking at a hustling sales associate) and you can find some real bargains that way. This gives you the main benefit of a dupe (lower prices) without compromising in any way.
Yankees make SHOCKING announcements, MLB tries out the ABS in Spring Training | Baseball Bar-B-Cast
Jake Mintz and Jordan Shusterman discuss the Yankees changing their tune when it comes to beards and their losses, MLB giving the Automated Ball-Strike challenge system a try and thirty things they love so far from Spring Training.
Yankees make SHOCKING announcements, MLB tries out the ABS in Spring Training | Baseball Bar-B-Cast
Jake Mintz and Jordan Shusterman discuss the Yankees changing their tune when it comes to beards and their losses, MLB giving the Automated Ball-Strike challenge system a try and thirty things they love so far from Spring Training.
NASA revises asteroid 2024 YR4 threat, near-zero chance of Earth impact
Tuesday, February 25, 2025
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the European Space Agency (ESA) have further lowered the predicted likelihood of asteroid 2024 YR4 impacting Earth, citing refined trajectory calculations based on new observational data. Initially discovered in December 2024, the asteroid was estimated to have a 2.3% chance of collision on December 22, 2032. However, as of February 24, 2025, NASA has updated its assessment, indicating on the Planetary Defense blog that “there is no significant potential for this asteroid to impact our planet for the next century.”
Image: Leonid Kulik, the expedition to the Tunguska event.
Despite the diminished risk to Earth, NASA states there remains a 1.7% chance that 2024 YR4 could impact the Moon on the same date. The asteroid was estimated to be between 130 and 300 feet in diameter. A similar-sized object likely caused the 1908 Tunguska event in Siberia, which leveled several hundred acres of remote forest.
Scientists planned to continue to monitor 2024 YR4 using various observatories, including the James Webb Space Telescope. These efforts aim to refine estimates of the asteroid’s size and trajectory, enhancing planetary defense preparedness. NASA released a statement that read in-part; “While this asteroid no longer poses a significant impact hazard to Earth, 2024 YR4 provided an invaluable opportunity.” Further assessments are planned, particularly as the asteroid is expected to make another close approach in 2028.
Related news
Sources
- Chas Danner. “Congratulations, You Probably Won’t Be Killed by an Asteroid in 2032” — New York Magazine, February 24, 2025
- Marcia Dunn. “Asteroid 2024 YR4 is no longer a threat to Earth, scientists say” — Associated Press, February 24, 2025
- Molly L Wasser. “Latest Calculations Conclude Asteroid 2024 YR4 Now Poses No Significant Threat to Earth in 2032 and Beyond” — NASA Planetary Defense Blog, February 24, 2025
The Google Pixel 9 Pro XL Is Already $300 Off
We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication.
The Pixel 9 Pro is the latest, most premium model in the Pixel lineup. It was released in August 2024, and already the unlocked 128GB Google Pixel 9 Pro XL is discounted to $799 (down from $1,099). That’s the lowest price it has yet reached on Amazon, according to price-tracking tools.
This Pixel 9 Pro XL comes with 16GB of RAM, 128GB of memory storage, a 120 HZ refresh rate, and the Android 14 operating system. As Michelle Ehrhardt explained in Lifehacker’s review of the Pixel 9 Pro, the phone’s hardware is the best Google has produced, but its AI features aren’t quite there yet. The XL version is bigger than the regular Pro size, but smaller than previous XL versions at 6.4 by 3.0 by 0.3 inches.
If you have the Pixel 8 Pro, you might not notice a huge difference. However, if you’re upgrading from an older phone or switching from a non-Pixel phone, the 9 Pro XL has a lot to love, especially if you prioritize good cameras.
One of the best aspects of Pixel phones is their future-proofing: They tend to receive ongoing support for many years. My Pixel 6A still gets all of the updates and tons of AI features that make the phone feel fresh many years later. With the Pixel 9 Pro XL, you’ll be getting a quality phone that will receive software updates for some time (as long as seven years).