# The Body Shop — Dewberry Perfume Oil > Dewberry is a 1988-launched perfume oil that became, alongside White Musk, the defining scent of The Body Shop's Perfume Bar era and arguably the single most-remembered drugstore-sourcefragrance among ## Essence Dewberry is a 1988-launched perfume oil that became, alongside White Musk, the defining scent of The Body Shop's Perfume Bar era and arguably the single most-remembered drugstore-sourcefragrance among British and Australian women of the 1990s. It's a juicy, faintly green blackcurrant-pear-apple opening over a soft white-floral heart and a creamy peach-apricot-cedar-musk base, originally sold as an alcohol-free oil in small dab-on glass bottles that lived on bedroom dressers throughout the decade. Discontinued in 2002, it generated a 20-year lobbying campaign by fans and was relaunched in January 2026 as part of The Body Shop's 50th-anniversary range - with a reformulated juice that early reviewers note smells noticeably different from the original. The dossier here treats the 1988 - 2002 original oil unless otherwise noted. ## Scent Profile Catalog notes - blackcurrant, grapefruit, apple, pear up top; freesia, rose, jasmine, lily-of-the-valley in the heart; peach, apricot, cedar, musk in the base - line up well with how wearers memory describes it. The opening read on published listings reviews of the original oil converges remarkably: a sharp, almost zingy dark-berry burst (the blackcurrant is the standout, often pulled forward by the leafy/green pear-apple combination), with a faint citrus lift from grapefruit. The descriptor that recurs across reviewers from Hello Magazine's beauty editor through published listings wearers ("zingy dark berries and crunchy leafy greens," "crushing the berry and leaves with your fingers") is consistent: it's a wet, slightly under-ripe purple-berry effect, not a jammy or candied one. The green-leafy facet keeps it from reading purely sweet. The heart in the original is a generic but pleasant 1980s-style mixed white floral - freesia and lily-of-the-valley most legible to wearers, with rose and jasmine playing background roles. As an oil, the florals stay close to the skin and read soft rather than projecting. The drydown is where the oil format mattered: the peach-apricot accord turns slightly fuzzy and warm, and the cedar-musk base settles into what one wearers called a "time capsule of 1998" smell - a clean, slightly powdery, slightly fruity musk that wears close. Linearity is high; this is not a complicated structure, and most wearers report the dominant impression (sweet berry + soft musk) holding from minute 15 onward. The signature accord - and the reason Dewberry imprinted so hard - is the marriage of crisp dark-berry brightness against a soft fruity-musky base, with the leafy-green undertone keeping it from going saccharine. It's a "ripe blackberry juice plus clean laundry" effect, in non-perfume terms. ## Performance Reliable critical performance data doesn't exist; this is a wearer-led fragrance for performance. wearers describe the oil as having "real lasting power" and being recognizable on others from across a room, but as an oil applied to pulse points, projection is moderate rather than booming. The repeated wearers claim is that the formula was tenacious enough to leave a trace on clothing and skin for hours. The relaunched 2026 mist format is reported to be lighter and shorter-lived; commenters on the published listings relaunch thread note that the new oil version is closer to the original in feel but the scent profile itself differs. ## Wearing Context Casual and personal, not formal - this is a fragrance with strong connotations of adolescence and young womanhood. Hello Magazine's Gen X beauty editor explicitly framed the choice as a teenage signifier: "your perfume choices were non-negotiable - you wore one of two iconic scents, either Dewberry by The Body Shop, or its arch rival, White Musk." It works year-round but is most at home in spring and summer, daytime, school/uni/casual social contexts. As a practical reading (consensus rather than critic statement), it skews young and feminine, and adult re-wearers tend to frame it as a nostalgia choice rather than a sophisticated signature. For midlife wearers approaching the relaunch, the Hello Magazine review's verdict was that it still works as a casual daytime scent, with the green accord providing enough structural backbone to keep it from reading purely juvenile. ## Comparisons & DNA Within Body Shop's own line, the closest cousin in spirit (though not in scent) is **White Musk** - the other defining 1990s Perfume Bar staple, which played the clean/soft musk side against Dewberry's fruity-green side; the two were sold and remembered as a pair. Outside the house, the most-cited comparison in wearer discussion is **Lalique Amethyst** (2007), which wearers and re-blogs (iscentyouaday) repeatedly recommend as a more sophisticated cousin of the Dewberry feeling - a blackberry-violet-rose construction over musk that scratches a similar itch with more polish. Some wearers also nominate **Jubilee Scents'** reformulation as a close clone of the original Dewberry oil. More broadly, Dewberry sits in a cluster of late-80s/90s fruity-floral oils alongside contemporaneous Body Shop scents (Fuzzy Peach, Vineyard Peach, Strawberry) and against bigger department-store fruity florals of the era. The fruit-musk lineage threads forward through CK One (1994) and the early-2000s fruity-floral wave, though Dewberry's combination of fruit-greenness over a quiet musk is distinctive enough that wearers struggle to name a true direct dupe outside the Amethyst comparison. ## Reception wearers signal is extraordinary in scale and intensity, and almost entirely nostalgia-coded. published listings reviews of the original oil are dominated by phrases like "scent of the early 90s," "time capsule," "EVERY young woman had this oil back in the 1990s," and "smells so 90s." Polarization is sharp: there's a strong contingent that genuinely still loves it ("addictive, sweet, cozy") and another that views it as a relic ("not my taste at all now," "smells like a carpet store to me," Lucy Sweet's Substack calling it "a sickly purple mass squatting somewhere at the edge of your consciousness"). The most acidic take comes from a satirical Substack piece ("What your 90's Body Shop choices say about you") which uses Dewberry as cultural shorthand for a specific teenage-girl archetype. The 2026 relaunch generated immediate cross-platform attention - published listings covered it as a news story, Hello Magazine ran a beauty-editor blind test, and TheIndustry.Beauty positioned it as part of broader 90s-fragrance revival including Clinique Happy and Tommy Girl. Initial reaction to the reformulated version is mixed; the published listings article notes "early customer reactions suggest the scent differs from the original formulation," and published listings's relaunch-era comments split between "close enough, I'll take it" and "not the original." Common praise (original): instant nostalgia, distinctive, juicy/zingy, long-lasting for an oil, affordable. Common criticism (original): juvenile, overly common in its decade, simplistic, dated. Blind buy verdict: for nostalgia, sure; for a serious fragrance collection, sample first. ## Versions & Reformulation There are effectively three Dewberries to be aware of. The original 1988 perfume oil format is the canonical one, sold through the Perfume Bar with glass-dipper apothecary jars; it was discontinued in 2002. Various bath, body, and shower-gel formats existed alongside the oil throughout the run. A short-lived re-issue around 2011 (sometimes referenced in published listings comments) is occasionally mentioned but poorly documented in whitelisted sources. The 2026 relaunch, dropped 27 January as part of The Body Shop's 50th-anniversary celebration, includes a 14ml perfume oil (£20), a 100ml fragrance mist (£13, the first-ever Dewberry spray), plus body butter, body yogurt, hand balm, and shower gel. The brand has confirmed the formula was updated to meet current IFRA regulations and uses different pyramid notes: dewberry / green leaves / eucalyptus top, jasmine / freesia / white lily heart, cedarwood / soft musk base. The eucalyptus and white-lily additions are new; the original blackcurrant-grapefruit-apple-pear top and peach-apricot base are gone in name, though some of those characters survive in spirit. Treat the 2026 version as adjacent rather than identical. ## Acquisition Notes The 2026 reformulated version is available through The Body Shop directly. Vintage 1988 - 2002 originals trade on eBay and similar resale sites; Hello Magazine reported bottles fetching over £75 ahead of the relaunch, and larger 30ml or 200ml dab bottles command higher prices. No whitelisted source provides batch-code decoding for the original. Counterfeits aren't a documented widespread problem at this price tier, but vintage Body Shop oils have variable provenance - some bottles have evaporated, some have turned, some sat in warehouses. Buy from sellers with good return policies if seeking the original experience. ## Notable Facts & Lore - Dewberry's cultural footprint as a 1990s artefact is far larger than its perfumery footprint. - The Body Shop's "Perfume Bar" - narrow-necked glass jars with glass dippers, where students and teenagers could try every oil and walk out with a small bottle of their favourite - was a defining UK high-street retail experience of the era; iscentyouaday's reminiscence captures the texture of it. - The product's 2002 discontinuation triggered what The Body Shop's Global CMO Victor Sabbe later described as 20 years of customer petitions ("I'm honestly not sure why that decision was taken"). - The Body Shop's 2024 administration and subsequent buyout cast doubt on whether legacy revivals like this would ever happen, which is part of why the January 2026 relaunch landed with such cultural weight in UK beauty press. - The relaunch marketing leans heavily on 90s signifiers - cassette tapes, corded phones, the tagline "The 90s called" / "Bold then. - Bold again." - and is explicitly aimed at the original Gen X user base as much as their Gen Z daughters.