How to avoid fake perfume when you shop online

Popular perfume is copied. Counterfeits turn up most on open marketplaces, where anyone can list a product, and they can look very close to the real thing. A fake is not just a waste of money: you do not know what is in it. Here is what we check, and what you can.

1. Buy from a store, not a stranger

Specialist fragrance stores and the brands' own stores buy their stock from the brand or its distributors. Many brands publish a list of authorised sellers on their website; if a shop is on it, that is a good sign. Every store ScentCompare compares is a real shop selling new, sealed products; open marketplaces and second-hand sellers are never part of the store comparison. You can see all of them on Stores we compare. We do show an eBay and an Amazon row above the stores on product pages, labelled as ads and kept out of the "cheapest" ranking; on either site, buy from the brand's official shop or a seller with a long record.

2. Be wary of a price far below everyone else's

Real stores price within a fairly narrow band of each other. When one listing is a fraction of what every store charges, ask why. When three or more stores sell a product, ScentCompare drops any price far below the others, so a price that looks too good to be true doesn't become the "cheapest".

3. Check the box when it arrives

Compare the packaging with the brand's own photos: fonts, colours, the seal and the batch or expiry code printed on the box and the container. Real bottles have a batch code that matches between box and bottle, a cleanly glued box, a cap that fits and a sprayer that mists evenly. A colour, a scent that fades in minutes or a juice unlike what you have worn before is a reason to stop and contact the seller.

4. What a barcode does and doesn't tell you

ScentCompare matches every listing by the barcode printed on the box, which is how we know two stores sell the identical bottle and size. A barcode alone does not prove a product is genuine, because a counterfeit can copy it; that is why we also only list real stores.

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