Gap will relaunch its ’90s fragrance in 2026, but don’t expect it to smell exactly like the original eau de toilette. Before we get into our first impressions of the new scent, we need to talk about what the original scent meant to fragrance lovers in the ’90s.
The background of Generation Z is as follows. The pop culture moments of that decade caused many of us to define and redefine who we are. We took a quiz in a magazine to find out which hair color best suits your personality. (I usually settled on brunette.) We were all trying to decide which Spice Girl we would be (mine was sporty and sometimes classy). And the starter Pokémon we chose for the new Game Boy Color game spoke volumes about who we are in 2D and IRL. (I always chose Charmander because Aries is on the rise.)
In terms of beauty, it was a Gap fragrance. The clothing brand launched its first four scents in 1994, which officially introduced us to “Heaven and Grass.” Dream followed in 1995 and Homme arrived a year later. As we slowly walked through the mall, we saw Dream girls, Heaven fans, a very cool Om group, and the nature-loving Grass group. My mom wore glasses, and I often raided her beautiful stash, so I wore them too. These scents gradually disappeared from Gap shelves, but you could still find them at Gap Factory Outlets.
More than 30 years after we first met Grass and Heaven, they’re back with Dream and new addition to the lineup, Harmony. Deb Redmond, head of beauty at Gap Inc., recognizes how nostalgic this collection is for many and that it can’t be easily revisited. “There’s definitely an emotional underpinning there,” she says. “While we can see there is an emotional connection to the new Eau de Parfum, there is definitely a new modernity to the scent that I feel is what today’s beauty customers are really looking for.”
Tasked with bringing these fragrances to life in 2026 were DSM Firminich’s master perfumer Honorine Blanc and head perfumer Nicole Mancini, who were responsible for 1996’s Om. Blanc added Dream and new Harmony to the new Homme, and Mancini is the backbone of today’s Heaven and Glass.
The idea to bring back these scents from the ’90s was years in the making, but once Gap brought these perfumers on board, the formulation took about two years, Redmond says. “We weren’t rushing this at all,” she said, adding that the team really prioritized consumer testing. “We put [the fragrances] In front of the fragrance savvy people we had in the 90’s and in front of today’s customers. The goal, Redmond said, was to determine if someone was an original fan: “Was that emotional connection still there?”
While working on these new fragrances, Blanc was very focused on the concept of nostalgia. “It’s so important today,” she says. “Since 1996, we have gone through another war with COVID-19 and now [better] Technology, AI, smarter consumers, big changes. It is because of this comfort that this new generation is looking for things from the 90s. The 90s are becoming comfortable and safe today, both for those who lived through them and for those born a few years later.
However, bringing the popular ’90s fragrance line back to 2026 doesn’t just mean warm fuzzy feelings and rainbows. Of course, “some of the original ingredients and formulas from the ’90s aren’t used in the same way today,” Blanc says. For example, in OG Heaven, we used polycyclic musk, which has the same scent as CKOne and The Body Shop’s White Musk clean laundry scent.
Source: Allure – www.allure.com
