(Retro) Teen geekery...

...the relaunch that's got everyone talking, what today's teens really want (from the founder of a brand they love) — and why what you see on beauty packaging isn't always the whole story...

Jan 28, 2026

The reaction that I had over on Instagram to the news that The Body Shop is bringing back Dewberry was so overwhelming that I couldn’t NOT cover it in this week’s newsletter.

First up if you don’t know Dewberry, you likely weren’t a teen girl in the 1990s. It’s almost impossible to describe the “beauty scene” of that time because there just wasn’t one in the way that there is today. It seems kind of inconceivable in the era of “Sephora kids” where 13 year olds are au fait with Drunk Elephant and Sol de Janeiro, but these were more innocent times. It would never have occurred to me to go and get colour-matched for a swanky foundation in a department store (that was where mums and grandmas with money bought their beauty stuff) — instead I bought Rimmel’s Hide The Blemish stick in one of the two colours they had in Boots and semaphored my spots by plastering them in the shiny orange “concealer”. I used the shampoo and conditioner mum bought in the supermarket shop and, not for me the sophistication of Summer Fridays or Rhode lip glosses, I had a Kiwi Lip Balm from The Body Shop — a much-loved Christmas stocking filler.

Because as a teen girl in the 1990s, The Body Shop was the height of sophistication. It was THE place you went to buy birthday presents and, if you knew which of The Body Shop’s core fragrances — White Musk, Fuzzy Peach, Ananya, Vanilla, Dewberry — your friend wore, it made life easy. I was Fuzzy Peach, my sister was White Musk, but one of my best friends, Gabrielle, wore Dewberry. So, for her birthday, she inevitably got a small basket filled with green shredded paper and miniatures of the Dewberry shower gel, body cream or whatever. And BATH PEARLS. Capsules made from a hardened gelatine that contained scented bath oil, they were designed to dissolve in hot water, flooding your bath with scented oil that never really drained away with the water, making it a death trap for whoever stepped into it next. (Of course I didn’t clean the bath afterwards, I was a teenage girl.) Where did bath pearls go? I wouldn’t rule out a comeback. When I went to The Body Shop’s Dewberry launch last week, I spoke to Victor Sabbe and Shimon Kalichman of their marketing team and I know they have been watching and listening to the social media response to Dewberry and the nostalgia it’s provoked and thinking about what other iconic products they might revisit.

I think there’s a really interesting conversation to be had about how, as a brand, when you bring back old favourites you manage to do it in a way that’s successful. I know that there are going to be a lot of millennials and Gen Xers who are going to want to dabble in Dewberry — and the prices (see below) are accessible enough that you can buy something as an in-joke for an old friend, or to douse yourself in 1994 for the night. But are these women, now in their 40s, actually going to re-purchase? And crucially, despite the 90s trends that Gen Z and Gen Alpha seem to be loving, are they going to buy the same stuff that their mums are buying?

For those of you that didn’t smell it first time around, I’ll do my best… it’s a real explosion of dark fruits (a dewberry if you didn’t know — and I didn’t — is a close relative of the blackberry) — there are also some greener notes and a bit of eucalyptus to give it a bit more of a fresher edge . Then there are the florals — jasmine, freesia and white lily — with a base of cedarwood and musk. But what really hits you is the floral / berry combo. (It’s not the exact same formulation, it’s been updated inline with modern regulations, but the notes are the same, and, to my amateur nose anyway, it’s indistinguishable from the original.)

There’s the Perfume Oil (£20), in exactly the same bottle with exactly the same little plastic applicator that was always a bit useless towards the end of the bottle and seems vaguely unsanitary (as borne out by the fact that the more you used, the cloudier the oil became, presumably thanks to the transfer of skin cells into it - urgh); a Fragrance Mist (£14), designed to lure in the teens obsessed with Sol de Janeiro body sprays; the Bath & Shower Gel (from £3.50), the Body Butter — naturally (from £7); the Hand Balm (£7); and the Body Yoghurt (£14), which I think is probably the most interesting in terms of texture — it’s somewhere between a cream and a lotion, absorbs really quickly and leaves skin feeling less greasy than the Body Butter.

My worry is that, for all they’ve gone hard on interesting textures and youth-trapping formulations, it’s not sweet enough for Gen Z who go ga-ga for gourmande scents but that it’s going to be too sweet for the people who wore it first time around. I’ll be honest, it’s not my bag, but if it was yours and you want to wear it with a 40-something twist, I do think there’s a way that you can do it.

I am not a scent expert like Hannah Betts or Alice du Parcq, but I do like to experiment with perfume and one of the ways I do this is to layer it up. I have two favourites that I each adore worn alone, but layered together, they deliver in a way that is more than the sum of their parts. I think people can get too precious about this sort of thing. For all that I have huge respect for the noses that create fragrance, I think it’s a) really personal and b) can just be fun. So my immediate instinct when I smelled Dewberry was that to make it wearable for me it would need to have something zestier, citrussy in there — I love Dior’s Escale a Portofino, all bergamot and lemon, but I’ve run out so I layered it with Zara’s Fleur D’Oranger which I found in my beauty cupboard. It’s more orangey than lemon, and more floral, but it did exactly what I wanted it to, tempering the sweeter notes in the Dewberry and giving it more bite. You could still get the iconic berry but it felt more modern, more me.

Anyway those are my thoughts on the Dewberry comeback. Please let me know yours. Did you wear it? Will you buy it? I want to hear all about your Proustian rushes… Oh and Fuzzy Peach fans, while I am campaigning for that to be the next revival, the closest I’ve found which isn’t quite it but has the same juicy fruity with an edge vibe is Jo Love’s Mango Thai Lime (from £10 for a 2ml tester).

I feel like it’s quite a teen themed newsletter this week because the other thing I wanted to tell you about was my meeting with Tiffany Salmon-Mills, the founder of Glow Hub, a teen-focused brand you might have heard of, and Creative Director of Amelia Knight, a company you’re less likely to have heard of because they’re private label cosmetics manufacturers who make beauty products for everyone from Asda and Primark through to high end brands whose names you will definitely have heard of but who I can’t mention (sorry) because brands like that don’t like you to think that they’re paying a third party to come up with formulations, manufacture them and package them.

Anyway, we had a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion about a load of things — one of my favourite things was her introducing me to a term for ingredients that are included at a level that isn’t significant enough for them to actually be doing anything but because they’re present, you can mention them on the packaging, in press releases etc. In the past I’ve heard ingredients like this referred to as “fictives” or “factives” — fictitious actives so eg. everyone will be talking about charcoal, so a brand will bring out a scalp-clearing shampoo with charcoal. The consumer sees the word “charcoal”, has read everywhere that charcoal can detox, and so assumes that that’s what’s doing the heavy lifting when in fact it’s a bunch of more prosaic, but less trendy, ingredients. Anyway, Tiffany called these “story level” actives, which tickled me.

We also talked about one of the products that is going gangbusters for them at the moment which kind of surprised me at first, but actually makes perfect sense — their Cleansing Hand Mist. (How crazy that something almost nobody used pre-pandemic has become a beauty staple? But it has. In the US — which immediately makes it desirable in the UK — people are going crazy for the Touchland brand that you’ll have seen all over Insta.)

It sounds ridiculous, but Glow Hub’s version actually hits so many teen (& older?) touch points. First up it comes with a keychain style clip, tapping into the bag charm trend that is going nowhere. It also comes with a sheet of stickers making it customisable. Unlike many hand sanitisers it’s got glycerin which makes it less drying, and it comes in three fragrances that don’t smell like hand sanitiser — the one above is Dopamine, a sort of spicy floral combination. (BTW if you’re looking for other hand sanitisers that don’t smell like hand sanitiser, I hard recommend SoapSmith’s Brick Lane Rinse Free Handwash (£8) and Bower Refillable Hand Sanitiser Gel with Grapefruit and Lemongrass Essential Oils (£7.99 — although the refill which is four times the size is just £9.99) Then, have a look at their marketing — I mean it slightly gives me a headache, but then it’s not for me, and if I were a teen girl, I’d be all over it…

Anyway, for me, it’s always interesting to see a product doing really well and then do a bit of a forensic breakdown of it to work out why it’s such a success. If there are any other products you’d like me to dive into in this way, let me know, by leaving a comment below…

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