The House of Gucci was founded in Florence in 1906 by Guccio Gucci, originally as a family saddlery leather shop. As the company’s reputation grew, Gucci expanded to a new base in Rome, and, after Guccio’s death in 1953, the company went international, opening boutiques throughout the world. Today, despite a tremendous blip in fortunes that was halted by the arrival of Tom Ford in 1993, Gucci maintains its position as one of the world’s leading prestige brands.

We stock a wide range of Gucci fragrances here at Fragrance Mad, including Rush, Flora, Envy, and Rush II, all at prices so low that Gucci-afficionados probably don’t even know they exist.

OK, it may be just a little bit early, but Santa’s been to visit us and dropped off loads of great Christmas gifts on our doorstep, so get onto fragrancemad.com now to avoid disappointment! We have a huge range of Christmas gift sets available, from Gillette Fusion Razor Sets to Dove Weekend Essentials Kits, and a sublime range of cosmetics and skincare products. We even have some very cool Disney items at fantastic prices: Tigger Bedtime Buddies are just £6.99 (65% off RRP), and Winnie the Pooh Cuddly Pyjama Cases are a snip at £7.99.

Get your Christmas shopping done early and feel all smug; just have a browse through our Gift Sets section and pick out the perfect present. And save those baby-soft fingers by getting us to do the wrapping too: our spanky gift-wrapping service is available at checkout for just £1.95.

We are pleased to announce that Fragrance Mad will continue to be the main shirt sponsor for the Aston Villa Old Stars football team into the 2010/11 season. The team was established in 1960, making it the first Old Boys team in the world, and now plays around twenty-five fundraising matches per season, during which they have so far raised over £4 million for various charities. The strip has been graced by many greats of Villa’s past, including members of the 1982 European Cup-winning side, and today players include such names as Dean Saunders, Tony Morley, and Stan Collymore.

Neil Rioch, chairman of the Aston Villa Former Players Association, said: “We are delighted to have such a prestigious company as FragranceMad.com as sponsors of the team and I know many Aston Villa former players and their partners and families have already been online to take advantage of the excellent range of discounted products that are available”. For full information about the history of the Aston Villa Old Stars team, details of the current squad, fixtures and results, and the events and activities of the Aston Villa Former Players Association, please visit the website at – www.astonvillafpa.org

Since her days as one third of the chart-smashing girl band Destiny’s Child, Beyonce Knowles has seen her career launch into the stratosphere. Destiny’s Child slogged their way up from the American South, making their breakthrough in 1997 with a song featured on the Men in Black soundtrack, before releasing their hit album The Writing’s on the Wall in 1999, which sold over eight million copies. The band went from strength to strength, scoring a huge worldwide hit with Independent Women Part 1 in 2000, as the music-buying public seemed unaware that their songs alternately spoke of the paradoxical desires of wanting a man to buy them stuff and then not wanting a man to buy them stuff, because they can buy it for themselves. Beyonce made the leap to solo success in 2003 with the chart-topping Crazy in Love and, by the time Destiny’s Child disbanded in 2006, Beyonce had established herself as the only member of the group likely to remain in the public eye.

Beyonce is now one of the most recognisable names in music, continuing to churn out hit after hit, and has also made the transition to a Hollywood star, garnering critical acclaim for her role in 2006’s Dreamgirls, and winning the prestigious MTV award for Best Fight for Obsessed in 2009. That was some fight. As well as this, Beyonce has turned her name into a fully-fledged brand by designing her own clothing range.  It has taken her a little longer to break into the fragrance market, however. Beyonce Heat is her first effort, new for 2010, and is anticipated by many market experts to be one of the bestselling perfumes of the year. The scent certainly backs up the hype: it’s a fiery fragrance with top notes of magnolia, neroli, vanilla orchid, and blushed peach; a sensual heart of almond, macaroon, honeysuckle nectar, and musk; and a sexy dry-down of sequoia milkwood, tonka bean, and amber at the base. Despite its brand-new-ness, your bargain-hunters at Fragrance Mad have managed to make it available at 25% off the RRP. You can get it from us at the bootylicious price of £26.99 for a 50ml EDP, and if you’re buying for a special somebody, we’re proud to announce that you can now have it giftwrapped and sent directly as a present for just £1.95. This includes gift wrap, a nice little ribbon, and a personal message for your recipient. Sorting the perfect gift for a loved one just got easier.

Nina Ricci was born Maria Nielli in Turin in 1883, but moved with her family to France when she was twelve. She was nicknamed Nina, due to a presumably hilarious reason now lost to the annuls of time. After marrying to become Maria Ricci (or possibly for more romantic reasons), she joined the Raffin fashion house as a designer, later becoming a partner in the firm. Aged fifty, and yearning to make her unique stamp upon the fashion world, Ricci formed the Nina Ricci fashion house with her son, Robert, in Paris. She designed gowns that became renowned as classy and romantic, and the business quickly took off. Nina (or Maria) herself mostly withdrew from design in the early 1950s, before her death in1970, at the tender age of 87.

The Nina Ricci label has become synonymous with classy and elegant perfumes since they first launched the L’Air du Temps scent in 1949. Fragrance Mad has a wide selection of great Ricci scents available, but our favourite at the moment is Nina, launched in 2006. The perfume is a fresh, mouthwatering floral that opens with top notes of lemon and Caipirinha lime; a heart of love apple (whatever that is), peony, and moonflower; and a sweet base constructed of vanilla praline, applewood, and musk. It all comes in a beautifully designed bottle, and we’ve got an 80ml Eau de Toilette available for the great price of £32.99. That, by the way, is the price you’ll pay, none of these stealth postage charges tacked on in the manner of our woeful competition.

Donna Karan grew up in New York and has since made her name synonymous with the world’s most exciting (and violent) city. Contrary to the incredibly diverse ways that many of the top designers seem to get into the trade (check out other blog posts for weird and wonderful routes to the top), Donna was more traditional: she went to fashion school; she got a job in fashion; she started her own label. How fun. Today, Karan mostly passes her time being hassled by anti-fur protestors, who spent 2008 attacking her until she agreed to remove fur from her range.

Karan revealed her uber-successful Be Delicious line, available in both men’s and women’s fragrances, in 2004. The scents supposedly evoke the sophistication of NYC in the guise of a crisp scent encased in an apple-shaped bottle. It really is a very nice fragrance, like walking around an orchard on a balmy Spring day, or being in the fruit department at ASDA; anywhere that you can smell nice apples, really. For those bargain-hunters among you, we’ve managed to source a sensational price on the men’s 30ml Eau de Toilette: on sale at Fragrance Mad now for just £9.99! That’s a staggering 58% off the RRP!

Apparently, the best skincare in the world comes from nature itself. Surprising, since surely everything comes from nature in one way or another, but there’s a fine art in discovering the substances both effective and mild enough to improve skin. Aveeno have spent the past sixty years in the lab testing out everything they found in the woods, combining it with everything else, and working out the very finest elixirs known to humanity, and today they seem to have worked out more or less exactly what you need to revitalise your body.

Check out our Aveeno range of moisturising creams and bath oils, now at reduced prices at fragrancemad.com.

A great British success story, Paul Smith was born in Nottinghamshire in 1946, and although he left school at 15 to work in a fashion warehouse, his sole passion in life was cycling. Unfortunately, a bad accident left him hospitalised for six months and destroyed his hopes of becoming the old Bradley Wiggins, so instead he turned to his day job for inspiration and began to design, attracting the attention of the warehouse boss, who put him in charge of ordering menswear at the tender age of seventeen.

By 1970, he had saved enough to invest in his own boutique, Paul Smith Vêtement Pour Homme, on a shady back alley in Nottingham. The shop was apparently heavily perfumed to overpower the smell of Smith’s dog, and sounds utterly charming. The boutique began selling prestige clothes usually only available inside London, along with Smith’s own designs that he would lease out for production to local factories. After a few years of steady growth, Smith moved from the back alleys to the main street of Nottingham, before buying a disused bakery in the then rundown area of Covent Garden to convert into his first London store. Smith’s love of the simple and classic British design led to him becoming one of the nation’s most prominent designers, and his style has since become popular throughout the world, with stores thriving in Tokyo, Los Angeles, and Bangalore, amongst other places.

Smith has also become a major player in the UK fragrance market with much the same philosophy: simple, uncluttered notes making for classic scents that turn heads. Paul Smith Men is a daring men’s fragrance with top notes of bergamot, Brazilian orange, lavender, basil, and cardamom; a heart of fig, violet leaves, hyacinth, and geranium; and base notes of oakmoss, vetiver, sandalwood, and biomusk. Its counterpoint, Paul Smith Women, is a floral Eau de Parfum, vivid and woody with a combination of bergamot and clementine, blackcurrant, green pear and a hint of pink peppercorns. Both are stunning in their design and scent, and both are available now at super prices from your local Fragrance Mad website.

Paco Rabanne was born in the Basque in 1934, but fled Spain with his mother when Civil War broke out, relocating to France. After studying as an architect he moved into the fashion world in the 1960s, creating jewellery for Givenchy and Dior, before starting his own fashion house. He became known for his unconventional style, using materials such as paper, metal, and plastics, to form his flamboyant designs.

Today, the Paco Rabanne fragrance brand is one of the world’s best known, and the collection boasts upwards of thirty fragrances. At Fragrance Mad, we stock a wide variety of the Paco Rabanne range, some of the most popular being the Ultraviolet Man and Ultraviolet for Women scents, Eau Pour Homme, and Ultrared. Brand new to our store is the latest take on Ultraviolet, Liquid Metal, available in both men and women’s scents. As an added bonus, Liquid Metal comes inside a ridiculously large cyborgesque box, that will surely come in handy as a conversation piece at your next cocktail party.

As you may know, Fragrance Mad stocks one of the widest ranges of TIGI hair products around. On our site there’s something for those with curly hair, straight hair, long hair, short hair, coloured hair, thick hair, brown hair, blonde hair, and any kind of follicle in between. Products from TIGI’s funky range allow you to style or renourish your hair at will. What you certainly won’t know is that from the very moment this blog is posted, we now have a super mega sale on absolutely EVERYTHING available in the TIGI range. Whatever your style, however unmanageable your hair may be, you’ll find a funky TIGI product to match it, and make outrageous savings while you’re doing so.