Light Blue pour Homme Love is Love
Dolce & Gabbana (2020)

Disagree with this beeing anything like the original light blue, i do enjoy the original light blue alot, and have been using it on and off during the summer for many years, its delightfull citrus blast is just wonderful in the summer.

Now for this one, nothing sitrus to my nose, if there really is citrus in this one, then its very hidden by the vanilla, i do enjoy a good vanilla fragrance like boucheron jaipure and many others, but even the vanilla in this one is awful, its like the vanilla just completely crash with the other notes and just makes a overly sweet mess!

I did blind buy this one, as i am a huge fan of the original light blue, and though it would be a refreshing twist on the original, well i was very wrong..

Used it one time, then a second time a week later or so as i though is it really this bad, yes it was, havent used it since and its standing in the back of the collection, never to be used again, just cant stand it..

dissapointing to say the least..

Very close to the original Light Blue pour Homme but sweetened up with vanilla. The vanilla is stronger during the opening but you can still pick it up in lower doses in the drydown. Otherwise, it doesn't deviate much from the original in my wearings. The vanilla also helps push the Love is Love flanker into a more versatile scent, better suited for date nights and cooler weather than the original.

Projection was good, not too loud, and longevity was also good, into the 7-8 hour range.

I know some people throughout the 2010's were wondering when Dolce & Gabbana were going to cave and give the market a sweet "blue fragrance" masculine pillar to replace the aging The One for Men (2008), since literally every other designer that sees their perfumes stocked in major department stores had done so. It seems D&G has toyed with both bits of added sweetness and added "blueness" to the Light Blue pour Homme (2007) range with a series of successive flankers, but never both. Light Blue pour Homme itself seems to have capitalized on the legacy of Dolce & Gabbana pour Homme (1994) via its bottle shape, delivering an experience that sits at an uncomforable angle from Giorgio Armani Acqua di Giò pour Homme (1996), mixing in some sea foam from Bvlgari Aqva (2005) as well, becoming a dry and salty but uninteresting 2nd generation aquatic as a result. The flankers throughout the years (some seasonal, some not) have tweaked the formula with little drops of thematic embellishment while all staying recognizably "Light Blue", even though they have all remained more or less in that late 2000's aquatic style. Dolce & Gabbana K (2019) ended up being the long-awaited masculine pillar, and it went in more of a Creed Aventus (2010) approach to citrus, deviating from the norm in decidedly un-sweet Mediterranean fashion and a nice pimento that while not mind-blowing, makes a good solid platform for another decade of commercial exploitation. Since K became the new pillar for the house on the men's side of the aisle, the wish for a sweeter more Paco Rabanne Invictus (2013) or Versace pour Homme Dylan Blue (2016) type of experience has diminished among buyers anyway thanks to the glut of late coming redundant options filling the shelves, but D&G finally answered the question once suspected to be asked with Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue pour Homme Love is Love (2020).

Yeah, that title is pretty long, hence why I waited until the end of the last paragraph to even name the fragrance I'm reviewing here, and I suspect that I won't be typing that one out (or saying it much) afterward. Getting to the point, this new limited Summer flanker couldn't have arrived at a worse time, with most of the first world plunged into the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic and likely to remain primarily indoors for the remainder of the year, with no cash to spare for dalliances like limited edition seasonal flankers to common mall fragrances thanks to the paused economy. That being said, Love is Love adds a hefty amount of indoor-friendly sweetness to the Light Blue pour Homme DNA, beefening up the base as well with the dreaded "amberwood" amalgamation of ambroxan and synthetic woody aromachemicals that started replacing ambroxan alone after the end of the 2010's as the base du jour. In practice, this equates to the familiar salty aquatic fresh citrus opening from the original Light Blue pour Homme, saddled with some fruity calone sweetness that D&G chalk up to green apple and apple gelato notes. Now, before you go making jokes about how silly it seems to stuff gelato (basically ice cream) notes into a men's aquatic, let me assure you this does not smell like something you get from Cold Stone Creamery. Instead, the also much-abused pink pepper joins hedione to add some thickness and effusion to the center, which starts getting creamy in more of a musky fake sandalwood kind of way than anything confectionary, then the fuzzy nose-twitching amberwood takes over while I ask the waiter for the check please. A bit of vanilla rounds out the base but this just avoids being a gourmand on virtue of the freshness that still runs throughout. Love is Love feels like a bluer, sweeter, more youth-oriented Light Blue pour Homme could be a new "club banger" if not for the modest performance, so I still peg it as a casual summer fragrance, just maybe more summer evening inside than day.

Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue pour Homme Love is Love suits that fellow who wants to stay in the D&G portfolio but maybe wants another romantic evening option bedsides the tried-and-true The One for Men, or maybe just doesn't like tobacco and obvious amber fragrances to begin with but needs something with some sweetness. Perhaps the best part of all is the modest sillage and projection, making Love is Love better for close proximity like the name implies. I don't think this is bad by any means, and most Light Blue pour Homme scents tend to be harmless if uninteresting (including the original), although something like Love is Love feels a bit like a stretch of the imagination as an aquatic with a sweet woody amber base. Aquatics are almost invariably light, clean, salty if not soapy, and scientifically keyed to be casual (ridiculously overwrought luxury niche examples notwithstanding). Love is Love turns out to be none of that, as it gives you the Light Blue pour Homme handshake, then tries to plunge intself into semi-oriental territory, just with some suprisingly old-school aromachemical tricks (like the aforementioned calone and hedione) to dodge the ambrox bomb bullet, even if annoyingly itchy "amberwood" ends up being the deal-breaking mortar layed between the otherwise-pleasant olfactive bricks. This significant shift in tone from opening to dry down makes Love is Love one of the most daringly different flankers since the previous year's Light Blue pour Homme Sun (2019), but not as enjoyable thanks to the nasty base. Hey, at least the stuff wasn't named "Living Stromboli" like the 2012 limited flanker. I mean come on, was Dolce & Gabbana taking naming advice from Troma Entertainment or something? Go see for yourself if possible, but I wouldn't do anything out of the way besides purchasing a small sample to get your hands on another fly-by-night D&G flanker. Neutral