My gloves are finally off and I’ve covered up the holes I made in my walls with pictures if kittens on clotheslines with old quips like “Hang In There”, so I don’t get in trouble by my wife. My left eye is swollen, and my ribs are broken in a few places but my battle with the original Light Blue and the new Light Blue are complete, and it was EPIC. Honestly though, for the sake of having to keep typing Light Blue on here over and over again even if Google likes reading the phrase “Light Blue” so it will show Light Blue related content with this Light Blue vs Light Blue blog I’m going to call the Original Light Blue “the OG” and (pulling a line out of Men in Black’s Playbook) I’m going to call the latest Light Blue “New Hotness”. Even though, in my heart of hearts I don’t find that to be true even in the slightest.
Eighteen years separates these two fragrances, and I can’t help but point out that fragrance lines are starting to follow everything else in this world from products to TV Shows to Movies. I feel like everyone’s just run out of ideas and we’re just looking through our Rolodex and finding old things in there that we think could use a refresh and throwing darts at a dart board. Fragrance companies have a duty, and that duty is to keep coming up with fresh and new products for the consumer and a lot of the houses are failing right now. There’s Monopolies happening, regime changes, supply changes, and obvious creative changes that are going on and I’m not for it.
In a blog I posted a few months back, I mentioned that my collection is almost completely shifted from a designer-heavy collection to mostly niche. I was being completely transparent with you and everything I said was true. I’m done with the cheap cash grabs and the reformulations and redo after redo. I want something new, something mind-blowing, something that will make those around you say “Wow! You smell amazing”. Instead, now the conversations will start looking like this:
“Hey! Good to see you! It’s been a while, how have you been?”
“I’ve been good! Thanks for asking!”
“Listen, I couldn’t help but notice that you smelled amazing when you walked in the room, what is it that you’re wearing?”
“Oh! Wow! Thank you for the compliment! I’m wearing Light Blue by Dolce & Gabbana!”
“…”
“…”
“Which one?”
“What do you mean, ‘which one’?”
“Well, you see, there’s two of them, one from 2007 and one from 2025”
“!”
This is exactly how conversations will go. And to the normal guy or girl that just goes to Macy’s or Sephora or Nordstrom Rack, they’re just going to buy whatever they think smells good and they could care less which one it is they just bought. But you and I? We know. We know and you almost feel dirty for knowing.
To me, a company that feels it’s necessary to go back 18 years and pull the original recipe out for a really decent smelling fragrance, and re-release it tells me one of two things; either they want more money so they come out with a “new” version, or they’re just flat out telling you that what they made 18 years ago totally sucked and they felt it necessary to redo them. Or it was both! Sad to say it’s probably the latter.
Anyways…
The OG notes are grapefruit, bergamot, Sicilian mandarin, juniper, pepper, rosemary, Brazilian rosewood, musk, incense and oakmoss.
The New Hotness notes are…wait…am I reading this right? The notes are just lemon, rosemary and patchouli? Are you serious? To me, this is worse, because it could also mean that the ingredients are just too expensive, so they had to cut corners, but on TOP of that, raise the price of an EDT concentration with only 3 notes. Sheesh! Talk about a beat down to your wallet!
So, after all of this, how do they smell? You know, if you honestly had this type of conversation like I showed above, you would understand that the point of it is not necessarily just the fact that the wearer was clueless that there was more than one, but the fact that they smell so similar that the first person would have to ask in the first place. The differences are so slight in scent profile to my nose but what I CAN definitively tell you is that the OG should have stayed as the OG and left alone. The OG has a scent about it that’s too familiar. Take this and boost it up to the intense version and it’s the same scent profile but only longer lasting. It kept to its roots and honestly, those roots are gone from the New Hotness. It has no legs to stand on, it’s like it’s now “0 days without an accident” level of newness. So much so that when I went to my local stores to look for things unrelated to these two fragrances, I saw the new ones and inquired about the OG ones and asked if they still had them on discount. Everywhere I went they said that D&G told them to send the originals back. Erased from existence and it’s heartbreaking.
Final Thoughts
I hate having to write about the insecurities of the fragrance world and wish that everything was just all positive. I’d like to say stuff like “These fragrances all smell awesome”, or “This house is making new fragrances that are fresh and inviting”. Instead, I’m having to tell you that the New Hotness is ok the way it is. It’s fine. It smells good and has good projection being an EDT. Its performance is mid but that’s to also be expected. What I hate having to do is to tell you that getting to this place of even having to write this battle in the first place is just weird. Companies like Dior remaking Dior Homme Intense or even Creed remaking Original Santal is a slap in the face to the community in my opinion. See, we as a group love and respect each other for the passion that we all share. Problem is, we’re almost too passionate so when we see something like this, we all go straight to the comment section and tell people how we really feel. The message to those houses we’re just trying to say is – leave well enough alone. Stop re-making really good fragrances and marketing them as new. Signed, all of us.
This fragrance can be found here at Decant House, and I urge you to pick both up and try these out for yourself. If you’re new to Dolce & Gabbana, we have a bunch of options to choose from that are amazing Spring and Summer scents so try these out as well. What do you think? Do you like the new one? I’ve got some good ideas for the next blog so stick around for next month’s release! I’ll see you all in the next one!
