W7

W7 is a British budget cosmetics brand launched in 2002 by parent company Warpaint London, which had been founded a decade earlier in 1992 by Samuel Bazini and Eoin Macleod. The name comes from the company's former West London postcode, and the whole proposition is built on one idea: high-quality, on-trend makeup that almost anyone can afford. From a start in trading excess beauty stock, Warpaint pivoted hard into its own W7 label from 2008 and has since grown the range to over 500 cruelty-free products spanning face, eyes, lips, and nails, including an Ebony collection developed for deeper skin tones.

W7 is so consistently reverse-engineered from prestige launches that the beauty press openly calls it "the dupe brand." Its Honolulu Bronzer is one of the most-cited Benefit Hoola alternatives on TikTok, and shoppers regularly flag W7 mascaras, tints, and eyeshadow palettes as near-copies of Maybelline, Benefit, and Urban Decay heroes at a fraction of the price. US expansion in 2014 and rollouts into Boots and CVS (2022), Superdrug (2023), and Walmart (2024) have made it a fixture of the affordable makeup wall on both sides of the Atlantic, and it sits at the centre of nearly any drugstore-dupe conversation.