Sweet smell of success

ROJA Dove doesn't just smell fragrance; he lives and breathes it. And when he talks fragrance, it is clear he is a man on a mission. His remit? To raise awareness of the art of perfumery. It's a passion that has made him one of the most famous and oft-quoted figures in the world of fragrance. His number is on the speed-dial of beauty editors from Manchester to Melbourne. Barely a perfume article is written or a new fragrance launched without him being consulted.

But even all this isn't enough for Dove. The latest stage of the perfume preacher's crusade to bring fine fragrances to a wider audience is the opening next month of a Roja Dove Parfumerie at Jenners in Edinburgh, one of three opening simultaneously across Britain in October.

Dove, who celebrates his 50th birthday today, is thrilled with this latest venture, a spin-off of the Roja Dove Haute Parfumerie which opened within the Urban Retreat section of Harrods two years ago. To the surprise of many, the Haute Parfumerie has been wildly successful. But Dove instinctively felt there was a demand for it and is confident about his new perfumery.

Proof of the importance of scent in 2006 is the appointment last month by the New York Times of a perfume critic, who each week assesses both newly launched and classic fragrances.

Holding court in a department store coffee bar, Dove talks enthusiastically about his project. He is gambling his reputation and a fair bit of his own money on a boutique which will sell only the fragrances he believes are the crème de la crème - rather than the most fashionable. Yes, the Roja Dove Parfumerie in Edinburgh will carry Estée Lauder and Dior fragrances, but only those such as Youth Dew (from 1953) and Diorella (from 1972), which Dove has decided merit a place in his elite collection.

His unique selling proposition is that he is unaffiliated, and not only does he know the history of creative perfumery, he also understands how fragrances are made.

"I was driven by this concept of only selling the very best," he says. "Whenever I was asked what made me think anybody would be interested in buying 'old' perfumes, I would point out that wherever I go, people always tell me they're fed up with the overwhelming volume of perfumes on the market, or they find that everything smells the same. But the overriding thing is that people love the idea of finding a fragrance that is really theirs, a signature fragrance."

And Dove, with his encyclopaedic knowledge both of the technical side of perfume making and of fragrance history, is the perfect person to guide anyone in search of their olfactory identity. At Harrods, he is available for personal consultations to help clients find their signature fragrance. It has turned out to be a popular service, and he has a number of customers who travel from Scotland just to consult him.

With the opening of the Roja Dove Parfumerie in Edinburgh, those customers won't need to travel so far, but he will only be here once a year to meet the few clients lucky enough to have secured an appointment. However, all his staff have been trained to offer the same service, drawing on a computer database which records the composition of every single fragrance known.

The desire to find a signature scent has burgeoned in recent years. It fits perfectly with Dove's own outlook and his evangelical mission to spread the word about perfumes that don't get publicity, and which often languish on shop shelves or end up being discontinued. "This industry is now owned by five enormous corporations, so what I hope I offer is an alternative view, away from all the marketing nonsense," he says.

However, he is keen to stress that the trend for seeking out grown-up perfumes wasn't on the horizon when he opened the Haute Parfumerie - hence the feeling that it was all a bit of a gamble. Of course, he now feels vindicated, and points to the findings of a think-tank he was recently invited to join. "They asked 100 people who are perceived to be leading lights in their particular sphere - people like the hotelier Ian Schrager, and the fashion designers Alexander McQueen and Giorgio Armani - to make up this body to look at what luxury really is.

"What we all came up with is the future of luxury is bespoke, and that what used to be luxury brands have now become commonplace: what they are now are just companies which sell very expensive products. Handbags are a good example. If you go to a smart place and see three women with the same supposedly luxury handbag, then the thing can't be luxury; it's just expensive."

Dove says his perfumeries stock only the best, and price is irrelevant to him. "We have products from £50 to £115,000, and everything in between. I fell in love with perfume when it was truly a luxury item. It was something people dreamed of owning and what was in the bottle was a dream, it was somebody's creative imagination. Today, most perfumes are made to marketing briefs and whereas once the perfumers had the luxury of spending two, three or five years on a creation, today most perfumers have between three weeks and three months. There's nothing wrong with that, but you end up with a totally different product. Until recently, nobody was looking at great creative perfumery. Now, since I opened my Haute Parfumerie, Jean Patou and Guerlain have followed suit."

Ah, yes, Guerlain. The great Parisian perfume house is the one with which, until six years ago, Dove seemed to be inexorably linked. As their professeur des parfums, he was an ambassador for the brand, the first person to have worked for them internationally who did not bear the Guerlain name. During his long tenure with the company, he was a regular visitor to Scotland. His talks and customer events, especially at Jenners, were always sell-out occasions.

His Guerlain job came about, essentially, because he made a nuisance of himself. His obsession with scent began when, as a teenager in Sussex, he became intrigued by the Guerlain bottles - with the "unimaginably old" dates on their labels - he saw in the window of a local shop. He was soon pestering the company regularly for information, so much so that the boss, Robert Guerlain, finally said: "He'll be less of a liability inside the company than outside it."

Dove's hunger for knowledge about lost fragrances and smells hasn't dwindled over the years. One of his first achievements post-Guerlain was persuading Balenciaga to revive two of its fragrances, Quadrille and Le Dix. "These were fragrances that had been missing from the line-up of great classics for years," he says, beaming. "Now the collection is complete again."

More recently, he has been working to bring back from the brink of extinction two perfumes by an obscure company called Weil. These, like the Balenciagas, will be stocked in the Roja Dove Parfumerie in Edinburgh, much to Dove's delight.

"It's such a thrill. A lot of perfumes disappeared because they were no good or were of the moment and ceased to be relevant. But these ones - all the ones in my parfumerie - are more than relevant today; they were probably just ahead of their time. When you take scents like Miss Dior or Vol de Nuit by Guerlain, you have formulas which are still avant-garde and totally wearable. Commercial perfumery is nowhere near as creative."

So how does he think they'll go down in Scotland, a market he knows well from his Guerlain days?

"I've found there are a lot of customers in Scotland who appreciate the authenticity of something," he says. "People seemed to understand a perfume like Vol de Nuit was something special, and would take pride in owning it. I think that often in London what happens is people buy things because they can; Scottish customers respect the intrinsic value more."

• The Roja Dove Parfumerie at Jenners opens in October. Consultations cost £25, redeemable against a purchase. Dove will make a personal appearance on 8 November.