Gucci will launch Gucci Première, a new fragrance for women fronted by actress Blake Lively and named for the Gucci Première couture line. Première reportedly “takes inspiration from Hollywood glamour and the iconic women of Hollywood’s golden era”…
Flora by Gucci The Garden Gorgeous Gardenia, Gracious Tuberose and Glamorous Magnolia ~ perfume reviews and a quick poll
Gucci launched Flora in 2009. Flora is one of those light and sparkling casual florals, pretty and inoffensive — you know the sort I mean, the kind that go for pleasant and wearable over interesting, but that so perfectly hit that “pleasant and wearable” mark that they’re memorable anyway. When I reviewed it, I called it the still-cheerful older sister of Marc Jacobs Daisy, if that helps you place it. And like Daisy, it was just a notch above the competition. I often recommend it to people who are looking for something in that genre.
Gucci’s new Flora by Gucci The Garden is a quintet of floral flankers. Two of them — Generous Violet and Glorious Mandarin — are in limited distribution, and I have not tried them.1 The other three — Gorgeous Gardenia, Gracious Tuberose and Glamorous Magnolia — are widely available in department and beauty stores, and those are the three I’m reviewing today. All of them, like the original Flora, were reportedly inspired by Gucci’s “renowned” Flora print…
Gucci Flora The Garden collection ~ new perfumes
Gucci will launch Gucci Flora The Garden, a new collection comprising five floral fragrances, in March. The Garden scents — Gorgeous Gardenia, Gracious Tuberose, Glamorous Magnolia, Generous Violet and Glorious Mandarin — are flankers to 2009’s Gucci Flora…
Gucci Guilty Intense ~ new fragrance
Gucci has launched Gucci Guilty Intense, new variations on Gucci Guilty and Gucci Guilty Pour Homme…
5 Perfumes: Best of the 1990s
Twice, recently, I have walked past a rack of discount CDs that includes a “Best of the 90s” compilation. The cover features a pair of pouting Material Girls with tousled two-tone hair, red lipstick, neon off-the-shoulder shirts and black vests and leggings. I did not look at the track list, because I was so put out by the photo. I was a teenager in those pre-Y2K times and I think the producers of this album might have missed the last nine years of the decade. When I graduated high school in 1997, that look had already made at least two rounds as a retro Halloween costume. Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam were no longer touring and Kurt Cobain had been dead for three years, but my yearbook confirms we were still wearing plenty of jeans and plaid flannel,1 though people had mercifully stopped requesting Nirvana’s Heart-shaped Box, possibly the world’s least danceable song, at every party. Girls wore straight hair, pixie-cut or long and center-parted. I had a programming geek boyfriend, and after a few years of BBS posting using my family’s agonizingly slow dial-up connection, I had decided my future was at a school nicknamed “M.I.T. North”. There, my friends traded their jeans for Microserf khakis. Britpop groups and Radiohead were popular, as was genial stoner music of the Dave Matthews Band variety. Everybody seemed to be reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, watching animated shows on TV and going to a lot of violent, angry movies starring Kevin Spacey or Brad Pitt.2 In North America, the Starr report was out and events like Columbine happened, and it felt then like we were living through a very sad, cynical, disaffected era. Looking back after 9/11 and the global recession, however, and a few horrific natural disasters and inconvenient truths later, the nineties seem to me today like oddly sincere, hopeful years. I never expected to be a nostalgic old fool so soon.
I wasn’t obsessed with perfume then. I vaguely recall tropical fruity or citrus-clean skin scents like Calvin Klein ck One and Clinique Happy being very popular…