Winner by a nose

Despite the glut of perfume on the shelves, Parisian perfumer Mathilde Laurent's role in the luxury business is an unusual one. She's the first official perfumer for French jeweller and watchmaker Cartier - one of just a handful of in-house, professional 'noses' in the world, the others being at Hermes, Chanel, Guerlain and Patou.

Companies without their own perfumer typically farm out the task of creating a fragrance to specialist firms or independent noses, giving them a brief on the mood they want to evoke. Laurent, however, has a free hand over what she creates, from concept and theme to eventual realisation.

She seems to have been born for the job. Even as a child, she showed a keen sense of smell. 'I was always smelling things; everything, every house, every object. So were my sisters and cousins. But I didn't do it consciously,' Laurent says, speaking from her Paris office. 'So I had to listen to what my brain was telling me. I didn't choose perfume. It was imposed on me.'

Although Cartier began making perfumes in 1981, the luxury label decided in 2005 it needed its own alchemist and picked Laurent for the job, running a bespoke perfume service and developing scents for the wider market.

Their trust was rewarded most recently when one of her creations, La Treizieme Heure, won the perfumer's choice and experts' choice prizes at the Fragrance Foundation of France awards in April. It's one of 13 fragrances in a high-end, unisex collection, Les Heures de Parfum (the Hours of Perfume), designed to represent different moods during the day. Launched last year, the collection is being released over four years.

La Treizieme Heure is built around the smell of smoke and leather, which Laurent finds fascinating. 'The word 'perfume' comes from the Latin 'through smoke', as in smoke from a fire. This smell was so important to humanity. It's so ancient, you can't even understand it,' she says. 'It has a real magic to it.'