If you've ever stared at Rare Beauty's Lip Soufflé Matte Lip Cream in Ascend and flinched at the price tag, you're in the right place. We ran the hex color through our catalog of 25,000+ makeup products to find the closest matches across every price tier. Here are the top 5.
Quick Answer
The closest dupes for Rare Beauty Ascend are matched by comparing the actual pixel hex of each lip soufflé matte lip cream using CIEDE2000, the color-difference formula used in color science — not by matching shade names or marketing copy. Every match below is ranked by measured colour distance, and the five closest are listed with their price and where to buy. A Delta E under 2 is effectively indistinguishable to the eye.
Dupe. A product that matches another closely enough in colour to be worn interchangeably, usually at a lower price. A true dupe matches the measured colour, not the description — two products marketed as the same shade name can be visibly different, and two with different names can be identical.
Delta E (ΔE). A single number describing how far apart two colours are. Under 1 is imperceptible to the human eye; under 2 is indistinguishable in normal light; under 5 reads as a close match; above 10 is a visibly different colour. It is the honest way to rank a dupe.
CIEDE2000. The current international standard for measuring colour difference, published by the International Commission on Illumination. It corrects for the fact that the human eye is far more sensitive to some colour shifts than others, which is why it beats simple RGB distance for judging dupes.
The 5 closest dupes
Ranked by color match (CIEDE2000) then by price. Each one is in TruHue's catalog of 25,000+ makeup products — we checked the hex of every shade, not just the name.
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Know your color season? TruHue re-ranks these dupes to show YAY / OKAY / NAY based on your palette.
Get personalized YAYs →How we pick dupes
Every product in our catalog has its real pixel hex extracted from swatch imagery — not just the marketing name. We compare using CIEDE2000, the same color-difference formula professional color scientists use. A ΔE under 2 is usually indistinguishable to the human eye; ΔE under 5 reads as a close match.
We also weight for shoppability: dupes that are easy to buy on Amazon or Walmart rank higher than rare/exclusive matches, because the whole point of a dupe is that you can actually get it.
Frequently asked questions
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