The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Eternal 90-s launched in 2024, and the name doesn't hide its ambition. This is a fragrance built around the sensory shorthand of a specific decade, the cheap plastic thrill of candy-shop fruit and cinnamon-dusted sweetness that lived in every corner store and bedroom shelf. Maria Ruban composed it herself, perfumer and brand owner in one, which means the formula passed through a single creative sensibility. It reads as deliberate nostalgia, but not the polite kind. More like a flavor you'd forgotten your mouth remembered. The composition refuses to grow up on you. It commits fully to its candy-shop premise, leaning into notes like synthetic banana and chewing gum accords with the shamelessness of something that knows exactly what it wants to be.
What makes Eternal 90-s interesting isn't the nostalgia itself, but how the structure refuses to apologize for being what it is. The green banana peel, the chewing gum, the ripe fruit flesh next to crisp banana leaf: these aren't softened or elevated into something abstract. The candy stays candy. Cinnamon does the heavy lifting as the only spice note in the pyramid, anchoring all that fruit sweetness with a dry warmth that keeps it from dissolving into pure sugar. Ambrette adds a musky, slightly powdery undertone that prevents the composition from feeling like a confectionery display.
The evolution
The first spray hits with that unmistakable synthetic fruit, a burst of banana and chewing gum so direct it reads almost edible. Green peel adds a sharp, slightly bitter edge underneath, like biting into the skin before reaching the sweet interior. Cinnamon arrives quickly too, not as background spice but woven into the fruit from minute one. The opening is loud, immediate, and deliberately unsubtle. It announces itself the way a candy stripe announces itself: there's no pretense of subtlety, no soft-focus haze. After a while, the banana leaf and woody notes begin to surface, pulling the sweetness into greener, drier territory. The bubblegum character softens, the cinnamon gains presence, and a faint white musk rounds the edges, taking the sharp candy edges off without sanding them down completely.
Cultural impact
Eternal 90-s is the kind of fragrance that wears its decade on its sleeve, leaning full-bodied into bubblegum and banana notes that any child of the 90s would recognize from a single sniff. The composition takes the candy-shop vocabulary of that era and turns it into a perfume rather than a parody, treating those playground sugar notes as legitimate materials for a composition instead of something to outgrow. What makes it land is the way it refuses to apologize for its sweetness. There's no dry-down pivot into smoke or leather, no secret adult lurking underneath the fruit. It commits to the bit, which turns out to be its strongest move.
