Angel (Thierry Mugler, 1992, Olivier Cresp & Yves de Chiris)

Chocolate, patchouli, vanilla, caramel.

We've all been talking about some of our favourite fragrances: I think it's high time one of us wrote about our least favourite.

There's no denying that Angel has had a huge effect on the perfume industry: it effectively created the market for comestibles and has been imitated time and time again. I respect that creativity. However, the smell makes me want to puke.

If one were to melt down a whole load of cheapo advent-calendar chocolates, and then stir in a bottle of patchouli room-fragrance oil, and then drink the resulting curdled substance, I'd imagine that would be quite a bit like the experience of sniffing Angel. People say Angel is sexy, but since the image it conjures up for me is of a dozen toddlers vomiting after overdosing on Hershey's, sex is approximately the furthest thing from my mind. It is a rancid, ghastly smell, that flatly refuses to die down or mix with human body smell at all. It's so strong that my throat starts to burn if I share a tube carriage with an Angel wearer and it smells of identical choco-patcho-vomit on everybody.

(Fun true story: my first encounter with Angel was shortly after its release, in the duty free at Heathrow. The shop assistant lady squirted some on to my arm. My stomach turned; I ran to the loos to try and wash it off, but no luck. On the following eight-hour flight to New York, I took trips to the lavatory every hour to try another feeble attempt at scrubbing it off my wrists with the free British Airways toothbrush. Result: red, raw, bleeding wrists, that still stank of Angel. When we finally reached the hotel, I leaped into the shower before I'd even sat down.)

Good god, I hate it so very much. If I could wipe every bottle off the planet in the interest of my own mental health, I would.