the.com/dupe

means To trick someone into believing something false, or a person who's been fooled that way — and in shopping slang, a cheap stand-in for an expensive product.

from From French 'dupe,' meaning a person easily cheated, which traces back to 'huppe,' the hoopoe bird — a creature with a goofy crest and reputation in old folklore for being dim and easy to snare. So the slang sense of 'dupe' for a bargain dupe-product is a 20th-century extension of the much older 'easily fooled person' meaning — the word didn't start in makeup aisles, it started in the woods, with a bird nobody respected.