Perfume: Start Making Scents.(The Good Life)

Byline: Nick Foulkes

One of the great harbingers of Christmas is a sudden spike in fragrance advertising. Images promoting eaux de toilette are an important and, for me at least, much loved part of the year-round adscape, but at this season the assault on our olfactory nerves is stepped up, with many firms seeing 50 percent or more of their business done at the end of the year.

Every now and again a big-budget advertisement with the production values of an Academy Award winner streaks across our screens. I remember being terribly impressed the first time I saw Baz Luhrmann's film for Chanel No. 5 starring a couture-clad Nicole Kidman in Paris. Chanel also produced Joe Wright's "Coco Mademoiselle" with kittenish Keira Knightley, who later worked with the director on "Atonement." And next year I look forward to "Amelie" director Jean-Pierre Jeunet's new film for No. 5 starring French sex bomb Audrey Tautou.

I love perfume and all its pageantry, which has taken a product intended to mask the quotidian odors of the human body and elevated it to the luxury pantheon. A reductionist view is that perfume has us smelling like someone else instead of ourselves; and it seems that this proposition is hugely successful. Personally I would not want to smell like footballer David Beckham (especially when he comes off the pitch) but it would seem that enough men do to make the idea of a David Beckham cologne viable.

In the more old-fashioned corners of British society, "perfume" is a dirty word; polite usage requires the term "scent." I am sure there is a sound etymological reason for this, but the conspiracy theorist in me sees a subtle plot to keep the proles in their place. Perfume is for the masses; just spray or dab this on, runs the subtext, and you will experience the world of glamour portrayed in advertisements.

When it comes to the theater of fragrance, there is a wonderful character called Roja Dove, who bills himself as the world's sole "professeur de parfums." Dove has created a little rococo grotto at Harrods, which is a great place to try perfumes you will hardly see anywhere else: La Voce by Renee Fleming, MDCI, and an interesting, all-natural South African brand called Frazer Parfums. Dove recognizes that buying a luxury product as evanescent as a fragrance is as much about maintaining a compelling sense of narrative as anything.

There is of course an artisanal side to perfume, especially the further up the quality pyramid you go. It is here that the ...