Spain's Beauty Industry Hits 11,800 Million Euros. Its Own Trade Body Is Worried About Dupes.

Spain's cosmetics and perfume industry hit a record 11,800 million euros in consumption in 2024, up 5.8% year over year, more than double the country's GDP growth, according to the "Radiografía de la industria cosmética y del perfume en España 2025," the annual report published by Stanpa, the national trade association for perfumery and cosmetics. Per capita spending on beauty products reached 234.5 euros. The figure has circulated widely this month, including in a Madrid gathering hosted by L'Oréal Groupe with executives and sector specialists, though the number itself belongs to Stanpa's own accounting of the market, not to L'Oréal.

That distinction matters because L'Oréal released a separate, larger estimate in September as part of its 75th anniversary campaign in Spain, commissioning the consultancy Asterès to calculate the beauty sector's total economic footprint at 19,000 million euros, or 1.03% of national GDP, and more than 350,000 direct and indirect jobs. Stanpa's 11,800 million euros measures consumption alone. The two figures answer different questions, and conflating them overstates how much the domestic retail market itself is worth.

Stanpa's report leans heavily on export performance to make its case for the sector's health. Spain is now the world's second largest perfume exporter after France, with exports reaching a record 10,124 million euros in 2025, up 5.58%, producing a trade surplus of 3,849 million euros. Spanish perfume and cosmetics exports now surpass the country's olive oil and wine exports combined, a comparison Stanpa has used to argue that beauty deserves recognition alongside Spain's traditional agri-food export identity. The United States remains the top market outside the European Union, at 725 million euros in 2025, though new US tariff policy triggered a 13% decline in that corridor, a headwind the association's celebratory framing tends to understate.

Amid the growth figures, Stanpa's chief executive, Val Díez, used the report's presentation to raise a different concern: the spread of dupes and counterfeits, which she described as a threat to brand value and consumer trust. The complaint did not originate on TikTok or in a marketing department. It came from the trade body that represents the manufacturers whose formulas and packaging are being copied, and it frames dupes as an industry-wide erosion problem rather than an isolated dispute between individual brands.

The legal reality complicates that framing. Copying a scent profile, a texture, or a general aesthetic is not, on its own, illegal in Spain or the broader European Union, as long as packaging and branding remain sufficiently distinct from the original. That leaves companies like Mercadona, whose Deliplus line has built a reputation for mirroring products from MAC, Benefit, Urban Decay and L'Oréal at a fraction of the price, operating in a space the industry finds objectionable but has not managed to challenge successfully in court.

International cases show where courts have drawn the line, and how narrow it is. Charlotte Tilbury won a 2019 UK suit against Aldi over its Filmstar Bronze & Glow palette, with the court ruling that the packaging's starburst lid design counted as original artistic work protected by copyright, not the formula or shade range itself. She later settled privately with the Australian dupe brand MCoBeauty and filed suit against Five Below and Pearl World over a lip plumper. Benefit had less success: its case against e.l.f. Cosmetics over a Roller Lash mascara lookalike failed, with courts finding enough difference in packaging and components to avoid consumer confusion. The outcomes suggest that even well-resourced brands cannot reliably stop imitation through litigation, only narrow instances of outright copying.

Tilbury's own 2024-25 anti-dupe marketing push, branded "Legendary. For a Reason," ran into a complication of its own making when a creator publicly pointed out that Tilbury's products share manufacturers with Kiko Milano, a lower-priced competitor often accused of producing dupes. The episode captures the tension running through Stanpa's own complaint: an industry warning about brand erosion while its supply chains overlap with the companies doing the copying, a contradiction no lawsuit or trade report has yet resolved.