A Beloved Artifact From My Teens Has Been Reissued for Gen Z. These Poor Kids.

Downtime The Mall Fragrances of My Youth Have Been Reissued. I Smell a Rat. The Body Shop and Gap have relaunched their iconic Y2K-era scents. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Rebecca Onion? Aug 21, 20265:45 AM Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Getty Images Plus, Body Shop, and Gap. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. In the years before their L’Oreal buyout and the onset of widespread consumer jadedness, the Body Shop was a place where you could imagine you were saving the world as you bought “butters” and sprays made with exotic fruits and nuts. (The Body Shop was also the first place I, a child raised in 1980s New England, heard about the existence of something called a “mango.”) In high school, I brought my allowance to the chain’s Harvard Square location and collected their perfume oils, sold in a distinctive round frosted bottle with a dipstick you smeared on your wrist. I had Vanilla, which made me smell like a Rice Krispie Treat; Fuzzy Peach, which I realized later in life was a close cousin to schnapps; and Dewberry, a singular fruity-floral mix with a light spikiness to it that became my school-day staple. I alternated these with the Gap’s Grass, one of a group of mononymous perfumes the mall giant sold in the accessories section, near the underwear and socks. Grass made me smell exactly like my parents’ porch after my dad finished mowing in high summer. After high school, I stopped being a perfume person, and completely lost track of the locations of my high school leftovers. Two of my Body Shop favorites are still unavailable, unless you want to splash out on eBay ($395 for one single ounce of Vanilla!), but earlier this year, the company brought back Dewberry, which had been discontinued in the early 2000s. And, earlier this month, Gap relaunched its ’90s scents as eaux de parfum—Dream, Heaven, Grass, and Om, plus a new one, Harmony. (Back in the day these were sold as eaux de toilette, not that I knew the difference at the time.) As a 15-year-old Gen Xer who knew the Sassy masthead by heart, the last thing I wanted was to participate in mainstream beauty culture. I wanted to be beautiful, sure, but without trying—self-confident, naturally appealing, a manic pixie Cool Girl. (This was before we knew these were misogynistic archetypes to be Shunned At All Costs; please forgive my former self.) For years, I wore huge, baggy overalls, left carefully unwashed for days and days so that the denim softened to a brown sheen that disgusted my elder relatives. Underneath, I sported baby tees, so that you could see I had a body. Grass, Dewberry, Vanilla, and Fuzzy Peach were my go-tos because they were conceptual opt-outs from the idea of perfume (fussy, tryhard, sellout). Instead, they evoked the real world (fruits, foods, nature). Seeing news of these reissues, and in the mood for embodied, real-deal 1990s nostalgia thanks to my participation in Slate’s Party Like It’s 1996 challenge, I ordered Grass and Dewberry to my house. My first impression was mild disappointment at their diminished packaging. I remembered the old Body Shop bottles as hefty, solid; the new ones are smaller and the dipsticks flimsier. My slim bottle of Grass had a black plastic cap. With a few sprays, I learned, again, the way of all flesh: You cannot go home again. Dewberry smelled like Dewberry for a moment, right when I pulled the dipstick out of the round bottle and took a sniff. English class! Best friends! First cups of coffee! But when I tried wearing it, the smell faded from its spiked high to a vague sweetness, then vanished altogether. Grass was even more disappointing. At first sniff, it smelled citrusy and light, but somehow the magic trick of old Grass had gone away, and I barely smelled my childhood lawn at all. The spritz faded to a vague mallishness, a flowery, cedary, strong smell I’d step around in the airport to avoid getting on my clothes. Later in the day, I was so tired of smelling like new Grass that I took an extra shower. My experiment with being a perfume person again was over. Every revival is bound to disappoint, and I wasn’t alone in feeling sad about these. “This smells like a dollar store knockoff of the OG Dewberry,” someone complained on Reddit. “The perfume oil smells like cheap soap. Nothing like their original scent,” another mourned. “It was almost ceremonial for me. I was so excited for the nostalgia to hit me — and then I took a deep, exaggerated sniff and the overwhelming disappointment hit me harrrrd,” a third wrote. “I questioned my memory, I questioned everything I thought I remembered about the 90s, because THIS IS NOT DEWBERRY.” I’ve learned through this disappointment that perfumes are constantly reformulated, according to changing standards in regulation. (This is something people who love perfume know very well.) Given this fact, why would these ’90s brands risk it? I asked Sable Yong, writer and host of the fragrance podcast Smell Ya Later, if it would hurt the brands for older consumers to be so disappointed in the revived scents. “I knew these new versions of the Gap scents would definitely disappoint a whole bunch of people, but at the same time, I don’t think that Gen X and millennials are the target for this. Gen Z is,” Yong said. “The way they reformulated the scents to be longer-lasting, to be layerable, they kind of hit all these keywords of wellness, and they’re using the nomenclature that the Gen Z demo is after.” Yong said she owned the pre-reformulation Gap scents, which she pointed out were still sold at Gap outlets as recently as 2020, and so was able to compare them to the reformulated ones. “I think Dream is the closest to the original scent profile. Grass, as you know, is completely different. Heaven is also completely different, which sucks because Heaven was my favorite when I was a teenager,” Yong said. “But again, they’re not for me and you, necessarily. They are for the new Gap generation, the Zac Posen era of Gap.” Maybe, as someone wrote on Reddit, it is we who have changed: “Your sense of smell gets different as you get older. Plus, so much was about context.” There’s something to this. I bought old Grass in the Gap in Concord, New Hampshire’s Steeplegate Mall, where the smell of the sample spray combined with the aroma of new clothes, the cold blast of the AC, the excitement of being a teenager with $20 to spend. I bought new Grass at gap.com, dodging pop-ups and paying shipping. How could it possibly compare? Fashion History Millennials Gen Z Party Like It’s 1996