Method
How a look gets decoded
Five steps, done by people, in this order. If any step fails we publish the gap rather than filling it with a guess.
Source the photograph
We licence event and street photography from the agency that shot it. Nothing is lifted from a search engine and hoped for the best, and every image carries its credit on the picture.
Identify every piece
A person works through the outfit and names each item: the brand, the specific product, the season where it matters. We cross-check against runway galleries, brand listings and the stylist's own posts.
- Confirmed means we can point at the product.
- Attributed means the brand is certain but the exact style code is not.
- Unidentified means we could not confirm it, and it stays unidentified until we can.
Price the original
Taken from the brand's own listing wherever one exists, in rupees, including duties where the piece is sold in India. If the item is archive or couture and was never publicly priced, we mark it unconfirmed instead of estimating.
Find the swap
The part that takes the longest. We look for the closest thing you can order, judged in this order:
- Cut and silhouette, because that is what reads first.
- Fabric and drape, because that is what reads second.
- Colour and detail.
- Whether the retailer actually ships across India and takes returns.
Check it, then keep checking it
Before publishing we open every link ourselves. After publishing we re-check weekly, because a dead link on a shopping site is worse than no link at all.
Verification
What we check, and how often
Limits
What we will not do
No first copies, no replicas, no sellers trading on a fake label. A swap is a real product from a real brand.
The match decides, not the rate. We link to retailers we earn nothing from whenever they have the better option.
Reporting what someone wore is not the same as saying they back our alternative. No celebrity on this site has approved a swap.
An unconfirmed price is published as unconfirmed. A plausible invented number is just a lie with a decimal point.
Sold out gets labelled sold out. We do not quietly delete the row and pretend the piece was never there.
Mistakes get fixed in the open, with a note saying what changed. Silent edits are how trust dies.
Questions
Things people ask about the method
Do you use AI to identify the clothes?
No. A person looks at each photograph and works out what the pieces are. Image recognition is confidently wrong too often for a site whose entire value is being right about the brand.
Is a swap a fake or a first copy?
Neither, and we will not link to either. A swap is a genuine product from a different brand, sold openly by a real retailer, that happens to be close in cut and fabric. Counterfeits are illegal and we have no interest in them.
Why is the original price sometimes missing?
Because we could not confirm it. Plenty of couture is never publicly listed. When that happens we say the price is unconfirmed rather than inventing a plausible number.
How current are the prices?
Every outfit page carries the date its prices were last verified. We re-check weekly, but retailers change prices whenever they like, so always confirm on the retailer's own page before buying.
Spotted something wrong?
A wrong price or a dead link is a bug, and we would rather hear about it from you than leave it up. Reporting one takes about thirty seconds.
- Wrong price or dead link
- Report it →
- Anything else
- corrections@celebritypersona.com