Ask 100 people, you will get 10,000 anwers. Marilyn Monroe adored Chanel No. 5, Edith Piaf made Le Cinque de Molyneux her perfume, Givenchy created L'Interdit especially for Audrey Hepburn. Perfume will always be a reflection of personal individuality.

"Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across thousands of miles and all the years we have lived. The odours of fruits waft me to my southern home, to my childhood frolics in the peach orchard... Other odours, instantaneous and fleeting, cause my heart to dilate joyously or contract with remembered grief. Even as I think of smells, my noise is full of scents that start awake sweet memories of summer gone and ripening fields far away".

When she wrote these words the supremely gifted Helen Keller, who was deaf and blind through having contracted scarlet fever as a baby and who was without speech in her early childhood, evocatively and passionately summed up the unsurpassed power of smell to arouse our emotions more potently than any other sense.

Our sense of smell has been called "the supersense", the mystic sense". "The supersense" seems appropriate since smell-related impressions are stored with astonishing vividness for years. "Nothing revives the past as completely as smell ", Vladimir Nabokov declared in Mary. And "the mystic sense", suggests the association between our deepest emotions and those parts of our brain in which are locked our "smell memories".