Today I was incredibly excited to see the mail carrier pull up with a couple different packages from me, because they each contained a different perfume that I used to wear back in 1999! I had used up my original bottles of these over a decade ago and by the time I had used up both of them, they were nowhere to be found in stores. Lucky for all of us, Ebay is a pretty easy source to find long since discontinued scents. There are a few other sites out there that sell discontinued scents, but I just prefer Ebay because it's much easier to get to see the total price after shipping.
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| Juice Bar's Cotton Candy is a delightfully neon pink liquid! |
First up in the review is Juice Bar's Cotton Candy Refreshee Spray. First up, I have no idea what a refreshee spray is, and it seems to be some phrase Juice Bar alone uses. It's just your standard body spray really. However, what makes this body spray different from all the other ones out there, besides the sassy girl on the cover and the neon zig zags, is this one smells like heavenly cotton candy. I spritzed this on me and was totally taken back to being 13 and borrowing my friend's bottle of this after gym class (after a tough afternoon of hiding out behind the bleachers, not, you know, actually participating in sports).
I've always thought that this spray smelled exactly like Bubblicious cotton candy flavored bubble gum, and it did not disappoint all these years later. This is clearly a girly teen scent and it practically smothers you in sweet, almost fruity, scent if you spray too much of it. I tend to go totally crazy with Victoria's Secret body spritzes, and was tempted to do that with this when I got it. Yeah, don't. One spritz (nowhere near your face, unless you want to be tasting it all day) lasts several hours!
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| I hope to add more to my Juice Bar stash! |
Juice Bar's scents were always pretty straight forward, and uncomplicated, the cotton candy smells just like cotton candy, Lemonade Squeeze (of which I actually still have just under half a small bottle of, all these years later, it was my least favorite of the ones I have, but nostalgia has made be grow much fonder of it) smells just like ultra sweet lemonade, and I certainly remember the Gummi Bear smelling like just that, but I guess we'll find out whether or not that is true in another review, because I'm definitely going to be hunting down a bottle of Gummi Bear.
The second scent is another one I got in 1999, Jovan's Fire scent from the Individuality line. I first learned about this line during some trip to Walmart or the mall, or some place that sold perfumes. Instead of sample bottles, they had an array of scented temporary tattoos featuring element symbols to try them. I remember thinking "Oh! Free temporary tattoos!" the first time I saw them, grabbing a couple of each, and the coming back for about a handful more of the Fire ones the next time.
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| 14 years later, I found a stash of these in my middle/high school makeup case! |
I lived off of these little tattoos, carefully sticking them on my
inside wrist so I could casually huff them all day long, until my mom
actually bought me a full set of these, the Fire was the first to go. They're not actually perfumes, or even body sprays, but rather perfume oils (although I believe they also came as a traditional perfume), which is a scent style that I've always loved and still frequently use, so I definitely was excited to get the chance to pick this up again.
Upon opening the package I was pretty much totally floored with nostalgia. What they say about scent being tied to memory is so true, and this was my absolute favorite scent for years. If Juice Bar is a teen dream, Jovan's Fire is definitely a more grown up perfume. It's a deeply woody and smokey scent, totally fitting of it's name! I dipped a little bit of it on my wrist and gently pressed my wrists together and the scent lasted for a few hours before gently fading away, just like most perfume oils.
If you're a fan of dark woody scents, even if this particular scent isn't something you got to experience the first time around, I would suggest trying to pick up a vial of this on Ebay, I paid $9 including shipping (which is significantly cheaper than it being when it was new, if I remember correctly) and it was well worth the price. I wasn't too much of a fan of the other scents in the series, the only one that really stood out to me other than this one was the Earth scent, which smelt very much like freshly cut grass, but I might see if I can pick up the rest of the elements online sometime!
This has been my first experience buying long discontinued scents online, something I was a bit worried about because I was unsure how the scents held up to both time, and my own memory, but I was happy to find that neither time nor memory has don anything weird to these particular scents and will definitely be hunting down some of my former favorite scents again! If I was a braver person, I'd be considering hunting down some of my favorite discontinued beverages from the 90's, but I'll probably be leaving that to the more adventurous retro bloggers out there.
My local comic shop tends to have a large collection of back issue and vintage magazines lurking around, usually for a dollar. One day while digging through some bins of them I came across this 1993 issue of Animation Magazine. I've passed up older volumes of Animation Magazine before because it seems to be largely an insider magazine and generally about stuff I don't care about in the slightest (despite the large amounts of cartoons I watch this side of age 7), but I was pretty excited to stumble across this particular issue, dubbed the "Outrageous Issue" and all about what the early-to-mid 90's did best: ridiculous cartoons. Featuring Beavis & Butthead on the cover and filled with articles and interviews about the shocking cartoons of the day: Rocko's Modern Life, Duckman, Aeon Flux, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and dozens of indie cartoons that have been forgotten through the decades. 
