Safran Troublant (L'Artisan Parfumeur, 2002, Olivia Giacobetti)

Throughout history, saffron has been associated with healing, and has been used to cure just about everything. Alexander the Great used saffron on his battle wounds; in ancient Persia, saffron tea was prescribed for bouts of melancholy; modern medicine uses saffron's anticarcinogenic, anti-mutagenic, immunomodulating and antioxidant-like properties. Cleopatra, wishing to make lovemaking more pleasurable, took saffron baths before encounters with men. Saffron has been used for thousands of years as a sacrifice to the gods and a dye for Buddhist monks' robes; saffron could, therefore, be called a physical, emotional, spiritual and sexual cure.

L'Artisan Parfumeur's Safran Troublant aims straight for the culinary side of saffron. Although you get quite a bit of spice in the first squirt (cinnamon, cloves and cardamom) those disappear very quickly and you're left with saffron, vanilla, cream and a little sandalwood. It's a warm, friendly, cosseting scent, like a big milky hug - highly suited to saffron's healing powers, and very akin to some kind of creamy Indian pudding with rose petals. Like many Indian puddings, it's too sweet for my tastes, but I think most people would like it: when I wore it yesterday people couldn't stop telling me how lovely I smelled.

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.