The best YSL Y dupe you can buy today is Maison Alhambra Yeah!, and the reason is unusually literal: its published note list is Y Eau de Parfum's published note list. Apple, ginger and bergamot on top; sage, juniper berries and geranium in the heart; amberwood, tonka, cedar, vetiver and olibanum underneath. Eleven notes, same order, nothing added, nothing dropped. The second pick, Lattafa Fakhar Black, has the longest and best performance record of anything here and would lead this page outright if the only Lattafa-branded Amazon listing we could verify today were a bare bottle rather than a gift set. And the most recommended "Y EDP clone" on the internet — Armaf Odyssey Mega — publishes a pyramid built on mint, lemon and pineapple, which are the markers of the 2017 Y, not the 2018 Eau de Parfum almost everybody means.
That last point is the whole reason this page exists in the shape it does. "Y clone" gets written everywhere as though there were one Y. There are six.
There are six fragrances called Y
Dominique Ropion and Claire Liégent have now built the Y idea six times for Yves Saint Laurent, and the versions are not concentration steps of a single formula. They are different compositions with different published pyramids, and two of them smell very little like the one that made the line famous.
| Version | Published notes | What it is |
|---|
| Y (2017, EDT) | Aldehydes, bergamot, ginger, lemon, mint / apple, violet leaf, pineapple, sage, geranium / ambergris, musk, cedar, vetiver, balsam fir, incense | The original. Sharper, fruitier, more aldehydic, and the lowest-rated Y of the family. |
| Y Eau de Parfum (2018) | Apple, ginger, bergamot / sage, juniper berries, geranium / amberwood, tonka, cedar, vetiver, olibanum | The one that became a phenomenon, and the one essentially every clone claims. Highest rated of the six. |
| Y Le Parfum (2021) | Apple, aldehydes, grapefruit, ginger / lavender, sage, geranium / tonka, cedar, olibanum, patchouli | Darker and denser, with lavender in the heart. Superseded by a 2025 release of the same name. |
| Y Eau de Toilette (2022) | Aldehydes, bergamot, ginger / lavender, clary sage, geranium / ambergris, vanilla, cedar, olibanum | A rebuilt EDT with vanilla in the base. Not the 2017 bottle, despite the shared name. |
| Y Eau de Parfum Intense (2023) | Ginger, juniper berries, bergamot / sage, lavender, geranium / vetiver, patchouli, cedar | No apple at all. The fruit is gone and the fougere is pushed forward. |
| Y Le Parfum (2025) | Ginger, bergamot / pine needles, balsam fir, geranium / amber, patchouli | A pine-forward reinvention, barely in the same conversation as the 2018 EDP. |
If you are shopping for a Y clone you almost certainly want the 2018 Eau de Parfum: the sweet-green apple-and-ginger opening over a dry amberwood-and-incense base, carried by nearly thirty thousand community votes and years of recommendation threads. Every pick below is graded against that bottle unless its own entry says otherwise.
Which Y is each clone actually copying?
This is the comparison nobody publishes, and it takes about four minutes to do: put each clone's published pyramid next to the six Ys above and see which one it lines up with. The results are not what the marketing says.
| Pick | Published pyramid | The Y it actually matches |
|---|
| Maison Alhambra Yeah! | Apple, ginger, bergamot / sage, juniper berries, geranium / amberwood, tonka, cedar, vetiver, olibanum | Y EDP 2018 — an exact note-for-note transcription |
| Lattafa Fakhar Black | Apple, bergamot, ginger / lavender, sage, juniper berries, geranium / tonka, cedar, amberwood, vetiver | Y EDP 2018, with the lavender borrowed from Le Parfum and the olibanum dropped |
| Armaf Odyssey Mega | Lemon, bergamot, orange, ginger, mint / pineapple, sage, juniper, geranium / musk, cedar, tonka, vetiver | Y 2017 — mint, lemon, pineapple and musk are the EDT's signature, not the EDP's |
| Maison Alhambra Yeah! Parfum | Apple, aldehydes, ginger, grapefruit / lavender, sage, geranium / tonka, frankincense, cedar, patchouli | Y Le Parfum 2021 — another exact transcription (frankincense is olibanum) |
| Dossier Aromatic Pineapple | Bergamot, pineapple, ginger / juniper berry, clary sage, geranium / cedarwood, amberwood, olibanum | A hybrid: the EDP's base, the 2017's pineapple, the 2022 EDT's clary sage |
Two things fall out of that table. First, the Odyssey Mega finding is real and it matters. Wearers describe it as a 1:1 Y EDP clone — one reviewer who owns both says flatly that he cannot tell them apart — and we are not calling them wrong about what it smells like. But a composition built on mint, lemon, orange and pineapple with no apple and no amberwood is, on paper, the 2017 Y rather than the 2018 one, and that explains the thing people complain about most: it reads brighter, sportier and thinner than the Eau de Parfum they were expecting. Second, one bottle on this page is aimed squarely at Y Le Parfum, which is a genuinely different fragrance and a genuinely different purchase. Anyone who loved a sample of the dark 2021 Le Parfum and then bought a generic "Y clone" got the wrong thing.
Why Y is the easiest designer fougere to clone
Clone quality is not evenly distributed across designer fragrance, and Y sits at the easy end for three structural reasons worth understanding before you spend anything.
The pyramid is short. Y Eau de Parfum publishes eleven notes in three clearly signposted tiers. Reproducing that is a far smaller problem than reproducing a dense composition, and it is why the best bottles here are transcriptions rather than interpretations.
The expensive-smelling part is cheap.The dry, warm, faintly mineral backbone that makes Y read as a modern designer scent is amberwood territory — the ambroxan family of aromachemicals, which is produced at industrial scale and costs a Dubai clone house roughly what it costs a Paris perfumer. The money in a designer bottle goes into naturals, the polish of the opening and the marketing, and Y's opening is a fruit-and-ginger accord rather than a delicate natural citrus. There is less to lose in translation than there is with the lemon-grapefruit top of Bleu de Chanel.
The field is crowded, which cuts both ways.Because Y is easy to approximate, dozens of houses have tried, and many have converged on the same sweet-fresh ambroxan shape. The practical consequence is that several "Y clones" now smell more like each other than like Y, which is exactly why we graded on published structure first and reported where a bottle drifts.
How we ranked these
In this order. One:which Y it targets, and whether that Y is still the one you are likely shopping for — a close clone of a superseded flanker is a worse buy than a good clone of the 2018 EDP. Two:similarity to that target's published structure, compared note by note rather than by vibe. Three:performance, from aggregated owner reports rather than our own stopwatch, because this family's clones are notorious for smelling right and fading early. Four: cost per milliliter at a listing we could actually verify on the day, not at the cheapest price somebody once paid at a discounter. Five:buyability — in stock, and sold under a listing that names the house making it. We do not have a lab, we have not run blind side-by-side tests, and our review method says so in those words.
One structural note you will not find on other Y clone lists: the top two picks come from the same company. Maison Alhambra operates under Lattafa Perfumes Industries, so Yeah! and Fakhar Black are corporate siblings competing for the same shelf. That is not a knock on either one — it is context for why they land so close in quality and so far apart in what a verifiable listing costs.
What we left off, and why
Four names come up constantly in Y clone discussions and are not ranked here. Armaf Odyssey Homme White Editionappears on several Y dupe lists, including one that scores it at eighty percent similarity — but its published pyramid is cardamom, pink pepper and mint over sage, aquatic notes and pineapple, on a base of vanilla, amberwood and cedar. A vanilla-and-cardamom base is not Y's dry incense-amberwood base, its own reviewers compare it to Armani's Stronger With You rather than to Y, and we will not rank a bottle as a clone of something its own note list contradicts. Armaf Ventana gets named as a refined Y alternative by at least two dupe sites; we already rank it on our Sauvage alternatives page as a fresh-peppery bottle in that lane, which is where its pyramid points, and we are not going to describe the same fragrance two different ways on the same site to fill a slot. Paris Corner Grand Rouge and the Zara Y Collectionbottles are both credible candidates, and neither had a listing we could verify in the Amazon catalog on the day we wrote this — Zara sells only through its own stores, so there is nothing for us to link. And Afnan 9PM, which our master dupes roundup notes is community-compared to Y Eau de Parfum, stays off this page on purpose: it is a sweet amber in the same neighborhood, not a structural match, and this page is about matches.
Four things to check before you buy a Y clone
Which Y you actually want. This is the whole page in one sentence. If you smelled Y on somebody in the last five years it was almost certainly the 2018 Eau de Parfum, and you want a pick that targets it. If you deliberately bought the dark 2021 Le Parfum, you want the fourth pick and nothing else here will satisfy you. If what you liked was the sharper, fruitier original from 2017, the Armaf is closer than its own marketing claims.
Maceration. Every clone on this page attracts the same note from careful reviewers: it improves over weeks. Clone-house bottles commonly ship soon after blending, and the alcohol edge in a fresh bottle reads as sharp and synthetic while the base has not knitted together yet. Give a new bottle six to eight weeks before you judge it, and do not conclude from the first spray that you bought the wrong thing. This is the single most common reason a perfectly good clone collects a one-star review.
The name traps.This category is full of them and three are live on this page. Maison Alhambra sells both Yeah! and Yeah! Parfum, which copy different fragrances. Lattafa sells Fakhar, Fakhar Black, Fakhar Platin, Fakhar Gold Extrait and Fakhar Rose, and only Fakhar Black is the Y clone — plain Fakhar is a fruitier bottle in a different lane. And Armaf labels a dozen Odyssey flankers "Limited Edition," including a body spray that shares the Mega name. Read the exact product name on the listing, not the brand plus a vague descriptor.
Cost per milliliter, not sticker price.The bottles here run from 50 ml to 200 ml at prices that look broadly similar, which means the real cost per wear differs by a factor of three or more. The buy buttons above carry today's verified prices; do the division before you decide which one is cheap. Our guide to saving money on cologne covers the discounters and the sizing math in more detail.
Clone, not counterfeit
Every bottle on this page is an original fragrance from a legitimate house, sold under its own name, built to evoke a famous accord. Scent formulas are not protected the way a logo is, so a house may legally study a popular fragrance and sell its own interpretation — Dossier prints the inspiration on its own listing. That is categorically different from a fake bottle claiming to BE Yves Saint Laurent Y, which is trademark fraud, is frequently made in unregulated conditions, and is something we will never link. Our longer treatment of where that line sits is in are cologne clones worth it.
Should you just buy the Y?
Sometimes, yes — and Y is a more reasonable case for buying the original than most fragrances in this hub, for one practical reason. Unlike Chanel or Creed, Yves Saint Laurent Y does turn up in the Amazon catalog in stock, at a three-figure price for the 100 ml, which is roughly four times what the clone picks above cost. What we cannot verify is who those marketplace sellers are, and a famous designer fragrance offered by an unfamiliar storefront is the classic counterfeit pattern. So our honest advice splits two ways. If you have decided you want Y itself, buy it from Yves Saint Laurent or a department store counter, where you can also smell which of the six versions you are actually getting. If you mainly want the smell and the money matters, the top two picks get you most of the way there for a fraction of it, and you can put the difference toward a second bottle for a different season.
One last piece of practical advice, which applies to this family more than most. The Y accord is sweet, fresh and extremely common — one of the most widely worn shapes in men's fragrance right now — so a clone of it is not going to make you smell distinctive. If that is what you are after, you are better served by a different lane entirely. If what you want is to smell clean, current and uncontroversial at work, this is one of the most efficient twenty-five dollars in the category. And if you would rather not gamble on a full bottle at all, our try-before-you-buy guide covers the sampling routes, while best cologne dupes is the master list across every designer scent.
