Of Remakes and Fakes – Can you get real Secret Honey Costumes today?

Hello everyone 🙂 Today, we have a different topic, we will talk about Secret Honey Remakes, factory remakes of Secret Honey costumes. If you buy a tagged dress new today, especially from resellers, and it does not have the paper tags, chances are, it is a so called factory remake not an original dress. Some resellers do disclose that fact, others don’t and sell these dresses as “tagged originals”. We are talking mainly about costumes here, casual Disney dresses aren’t remade that often, I know of only one dress and coat. I have no ties to a factory, these are just the things I know from experience and my thoughts on the open questions.

Here is What I Know:

• 2020: Secret Honey stopped releasing new Disney designs
• 2021: Secret Honey still sold some of their Disney costumes and also outlet items in 2021 but stopped completely until 2022
• 2022, the remakes make their appearance: The first remakes emerged from the factories, the dress I will show you is one of these early ones. They didn’t have tags or washing labels, there was no label at all. I owned the Anna Skating dress that was a remake like this and I still own a remake of the Belle Tale as old as Time dress. Both had no trace of any tag or label at all.
• Tagged dresses: After this early phase of factory remakes without tags, the factories started to add the Secret Honey tags and washing labels to their remakes. They are not always consistent with it. I own a remake of the Winter Belle. The bodice has tags and a washing label, the skirt only the washing label. The Cape has no tag or washing label. I assume the ones sold as tagged by resellers do have all the tags… But I don’t know, I bought mine as a remake not expecting the tags.
• Most important, the remakes are different: The remakes are different from the original dresses and their untagged companions! I will show you comparison pictures further down to proof that statement. And the differences are not just different fabric or trims, the size is sometimes different which makes it an issue in my opinion, because you can’t believe the size charts or the promotional pictures you are given.

Here is What we Don’t Know:

• Does Secret Honey know and tolerate it? Are they even behind it? We do not know, wether Secret Honey is involved in these remakes or not. Meaning, we don’t know if they undergo Secret Honey’s quality control or not. Or if Secret Honey consents to producing them or not. Since the dresses are slightly different from the original, my guess would be no. Why not produce the same product, if you have all the info about the fabrics and trims etc. I think, the factory has an original product but the fabric (trims, threads etc.) used to be delivered and they can’t get the exact same fabric (thread, trim, add whatever here). The factory tried to match the original as closely as possible but couldn’t completely reproduce it because they don’t have the data necessary (or it is a legal issue). So the dresses are slightly different but not different enough, that someone could tell them apart by looking at the promo pictures. For these reasons my guess would be: Secret Honey is not involved.
• We do not know if the factory is allowed to use Secret Honey’s patterns: We don’t know whether they bought the patterns from Secret Honey and are allowed to produce their own versions or simply use them without Secret Honey’s consent. Also here, the sizes differ sometimes, meaning the pattern is not always exactly the same. Did they alter it just enough to not get sued? Is it a mistake that happened while they copied the original pattern from an original dress? Do they use the patterns legally and changed them for another reason? We don’t know.
• Disney License: We don’t know if these dresses are licensed by Disney: They have a Disney tag, but that doesn’t mean that the factory pays the Disney license. Chinese brands have a history of not doing that, just have a look at this brick beauty here. Or the Magic Castle by Mould King. No license to be found here. I am not mad at both if they do not pay the license… Disney has enough money and J. K. Rowling doesn’t deserve a dime. But objectively, it would be kind of “illegal”.

Why Does it Matter?

It is not important, if Secret Honey gave their blessing for these remakes or if they are produced illegally. Well, it is, but not for us, for us it is the product that matters. What matters is that the Secret Honey Remakes are different from the dresses on the promo pictures that are shown to you to sell you the dress. You do simply not get what you expect and pay for. You get a different dress. Sold to you with a markup of between 20 and 100% on the original price. Sold to you as the original while it is not. That is the issue at least for me. Whether it is an issue or not for you is up to you to decide. All I want is that you can form a decision that is as informed as possible.

The Anna Skating Dress – A Comparison

Here are a few of my Instagram stories in which I compared the original Secret Honey Anna Skating dress with a remake from 2022. Here are the two bodices together. You can see that they are really, really similar. As I mentioned already above, this remake did not have a washing label or any brand tags.

But there are differences. The first one is the binding used around the waist- and neckline and to finish the armholes. The one on the Secret Honey dress is lighter and shimmers. The remake uses a darker green satin binding without shimmer. Obviously they also use a different colour of thread since the binding has a different colour:

The next difference is the trim in the centre front of the bodice. As you can see, Secret Honey uses lighter trim than the remake. This might be a design choice because the binding of the remake is also darker. What you can also see on this picture is that the shimmer fabric for the bodice of Secret Honey’s version shimmers more. Also, you can see that the thread used for the centre front seam has different colours.

The zipper colour is also different. Secret Honey used a lighter zipper than the remake. Could be a design choice too because of the darker trim and binding, but in my opinion, it doesn’t match the bodice as well as Secret Honey’s choice of zipper does. The thread used to sew the zipper in also has different colours.

Now comes the worst part for me. The remake bodice is actually smaller. The shirring panel is smaller and less densly gathered which means, there’s less fabric in it. These dresses are small to begin with, so for this to be even smaller than what you expect is quite infuriating to me.

The embroidery on the shirt part of the dress is different too. On the left is the remake, on the right the original. You can see that the Secret Honey dress uses softer colours and a lighter gold:

The embroidery around the hem of the skirt is also different. On the left side is the remake, on the right side the original. The embroidery on the original is less dense then the embroidery on the remake, there’s more texture. The colours are also different, this time it is the original that has more saturated colours. Also the binding around the hem is slightly shimmery on Secret Honey’s version using the same fabric as the binding of the bodice.

I don’t remember, whether this was the case or not, but on the photo it also looks as if the fabric of the skirt has different colours. But that could be the lighting.

I also screen recorded my reel of the remake and put footage of the original next to it for you. On the left side is the remake, on the right the original. Please note that they were filmed in different lighting situations and with different phones as well.

The Anna Skating Dress remake is currently sold for around 340 USD by the biggest Secret Honey reseller (of course you get a discount from them, it would normally be 450 ;)). Now, the original price of the dress was 28’000 yen plus taxes, so around 30’000 yen which would have been around 200 USD at the time. We have a markup of 75% here. For a dress that is probably not the same as the original. The question is now: Are the materials and the production more expensive for the remake version? My guess would be the opposite, I mean, we all know how economy works. So you are paying almost double the original price for a dress that is not the dress on the pictures and probably costs less to produce than the original did. The quality of the dress is nice, yes, but that is not the point. The point is the different materials and size. You don’t get what you see on the promotional pictures. Or what is written on the size charts. You do not get what you pay for.

But can I still get the Original Dresses?

Yes, yes, you absolutely can. I recommend you to go over Japanese second hand platforms. Be aware, since the dresses were limited edition and there are only a few originals out there, the price went up with the demand also going up. You will have to pay more than the original price.

One example of such a second hand platform is mercari.jp. You can buy from there by using the service Buyee, I wrote a blogpost on how to buy Secret Honey with Buyee in case you are interested. You can find costumes with the paper tags still attached or enclosed there for example. Also, if you buy a tagged dress, usually every piece it has the official Secret Honey and the Disney/movie tag.

If someone claims, that their dress is an outlet item (untagged dress), there’s normally some sort of label on the dress. Early remakes have no brand tag or washing labels or anything at all, it could be a sign, that the dress is one of these. Most of my untagged dresses have at least a Secret Honey label or a washing label or anything. Or the tags have been cut out . There usually are some traces of tags and washing labels. Make sure there are many pictures of the dress or ask for more so you can compare the pictures with the promotional pictures.

The problem is, that even on mercari, you can find these remakes already. Usually the price is “too good to be true” for a tagged original dress. Unfortunately, the tags or washing labels don’t give away wether it is an original or not, at least they don’t with my bad Japanese.

Also, there are other brands that create dresses very similar to Secret Honey. Read the descriptions, normally people disclose it with something along the lines of “It’s like Secret Honey” or they even write “It’s not Secret Honey”. Dreamland dresses are an example for this. So we must be very careful. When in doubt, look for dresses where the description states that it “was bought in the original store / from the webstore”. That’s something people usually write to proof authenticity.

In the end, since these remakes are so similar, it is difficult to decide. We can’t compare the dress in question to the original, we can only work off the photos and what we know. It comes down to wether you trust the sellers statements and pictures or not. And of course also wether you care or not.

If you prefer to buy from a reseller, then I would still recommend you @celeste_disneyboutique on Instagram. She’s trustworthy. She is transparent and has talked about the remakes and their differences to the original dresses on her account, here is one example:

But Which Dresses were Remade?

Here is a little list of dresses that I know were remade at some point. I probably don’t know of all of them, but these are the ones that have been “restocked” in the last few years that I have seen. Some of them are claimed to be “tagged”.

• Anna Skating Dress
• Anna Olaf’s Frozen Adventure Dress
• Anna Frozen Fever Dress
• Coronation Anna 2018 version
• Harvest Anna
• North Mountain Anna with Cape
• Elsa Frozen Fever Dress
• Elsa Snow Mountain Dress (that one should be in the making as of writing this post)
• Coronation Elsa 2018 version
• Library Belle
• Winter Belle Dress and Cape
• Belle Greeting Dress
• Belle Tale as old as Time Dress
• Jasmine Animated
• Cinderella Live Action
• Cinderella Ballgown Deluxe version
• Snow White A Smile and A Song Dress 2017 (Careful, the bodice is bigger than the original)
• Rapunzel I See the Light dress
• Rapunzel Greeting Dress (It has a different bodice pattern than the original)
• Ariel Kiss the Girl Dress 2nd version
• …

In Conclusion

You know my opinion already, I personally don’t like it, that we are sold something different from the promotional pictures we get to make our buying decision with. Especially because I am at the upper end of the size spectrum and need the dresses to be the size they claim to be. You need to decide yourself whether it is an issue for you or not. All I want is that you are aware and take your decision knowing as much as I can tell you about the issue 🙂

I hope this post helps a bit. I know it is long, I had a lot to say about these Secret Honey Remakes 😛 Thanks a lot for reading, I wish you a good one!

Love,
Ella