We all have our favourite. Jennifer Aniston loves Prada, Kate Bosworth is a fan of Jo Malone Vintage, and Claudia Schiffer favours anything with Tuberose.

Cameron Diaz? She prefers Brown Thomas's Clean, and Sienna Miller adores the "fresh laundry" allure of DKNY.

Celebrities such as Kate Moss, Jordan, Sarah Jessica Parker, Britney Spears and Beyonce have created their own best-sellers - and beauty entrepreneur Jennifer Lopez has eight!

Is your perfume really the best for you or have you been sucked in by celebrity endorsements?

Yes, we're talking scents. Smelling good is big business - the perfume industry brings in a staggering 16 billion a year. Yet there's a lot this highly profitable and rather secretive industry would rather you didn't know.

Consider the price of the perfume. The liquid in the bottle represents only 3 per cent of the total cost of producing it.

The other 97 per cent goes to marketing, packaging and advertising. And the selling price allows for a 95 per cent profit margin. There's a lot of money to be made in making the rest of us smell better.

Science is partly to blame. Today, your favourite scents are not coming to you from the garden, but rather straight from a laboratory - they are created from synthetic molecules, not from flowers.

Discovered in 1876, the use of synthetic scents revolutionised the world of perfumery. Suddenly, scents lingered longer and could be produced in large quantities. The creative possibilities increased dramatically and at a fraction of the cost of the real thing.

It takes 750kg of jasmine flowers to create 1kg of essential oil. In France, jasmine blooms only from August to October, and must be picked by hand during the few hours of the day that the petals are open.

The rose doesn't make life any easier. It must be picked by hand, flower by flower, at sunrise.