The designer scents behind your favourite Arabian perfumes
You love how the expensive stuff smells. You don't love the price. Almost every scent you're chasing has a twin on our shelf — same character, a fraction of the cost.
Pick up a bottle of Khamrah and you're holding a cousin of a perfume that costs the better part of a month's rent. That's not a secret, and it's not a con. The big Dubai houses study the fragrances people love, then build something in the same spirit for a fraction of the money.
Two things worth saying before the list. "Inspired by" is not "identical to" — skin, oils and the way a scent is built all shift the result, so think same family, not photocopy. And not everything here is a lookalike. Some of these are original creations from houses that answer to nobody. We've kept those honest and put them in their own section.
Find the DNA you already love, and you've found your next bottle — for the price of lunch, not a month's rent.
So what does all this actually cost?
Here's the gap in plain terms. The niche names on this list — Creed, Kilian, Xerjoff, Parfums de Marly — sell for hundreds of dollars a bottle. In shillings, that's tens of thousands for one fragrance. Even the high-street designer scents ask more than most people want to spend on something they might wear a handful of times.
The Arabian versions run a small fraction of that — often under a tenth of the original's price. Same character, same double-takes, a bottle you can finish without flinching. Put it plainly: for what a single bottle of Creed Aventus costs, you could take home its twin here and most of the others on this page besides.
Exact prices sit with each bottle. If one's stretching your budget, message us — there's almost always a version that lands where you need it to.
Each pair below shares a recognisable scent DNA. The bottle on the left is what you'll find with us; on the right, the fragrance it grew up admiring.
Some houses aren't chasing anyone. They just make beautiful things.
Ahmed Al Maghribi has been blending in Dubai since 2000, and their scents are their own — the "inspired by" on the box points to a mood, not another perfume. Lattafa and Armaf do the same across parts of their range. Buy these for what they are, not what they remind you of.
Recognise one? That's your bottle.
Pick the DNA you're drawn to and skip the designer markup. Or tell us the scent you wish you could afford — we'll point you to the one on our shelf that gets you there.
Shop the lookalikes →
