Scent of a woman. Three years ago Maggie Mangan got bored of her high flying career as a movie executive and decided to create a perfume. The result is a sensation, and she's been following her nose ever since.

The world of perfume is, it seems to me, a mystery.
The scent we each spend hours in a brightly lit cosmetics hall spraying, testing and finally forking out a small fortune for, is in theory supposed to reflect our individual personalities. However, in reality, the fancy glass bottles which adorn every woman's dressing table are about as individual as a bottle of Coke. This is because the perfumes we all know, and in many cases love, are almost without exception mass-produced by the kind of huge corporations which have their sleek headquarters in dazzling Manhatten skyscrapers. With a marketing budget bigger than some nation's GDP, the big cosmetic companies have become masters at dictating what fragrance we should be squirting, rather than leaving us free to discover the perfume we would want to spritz if left to our own devices. And these brands are notoriously evasive about the perfume production process too - because fact would chip away at the mystique that makes us spend over 100 euro on a bottle of oil and alcohol.

Galway based perfumer, Maggie Mangan, is about as far away from the corporate side of the business as you can get. Why does she create perfumes? For one reason alone - because she loves them. "My fascination with perfume started with my first job," she tells me. "I grew up in Newfoundland and, in our little village; there was the most beautiful perfume shop. It was run by a glamorous woman, who used to work as a model in New York. It was filled with exotic smelling perfumes in pretty glass bottles. I absolutely fell in love with it and have been interested with the art of perfumery ever since. "But even though Maggie had discovered a passion for fragrance, her career ended up taking her in a totally different direction. "I winded up working in the film business, on the finance side of things but it wasn’t creatively fulfilling," she admits. "I worked on some really big budget movies, such as the last Harry Potter film but something was missing – I felt it was time for a change."

So, Maggie and her husband Julian packed up and moved to Galway, where they opened a scented candle store - but it wasn’t long before she started to develop scents of her own. "I started off by studying reference books," she says "And then I learnt how to mix and recreate some of the most popular perfumes in the world, such as Chanel number 5." She discovered that all fragrances fall into three families - floral, which is heady with sweet scents; chypre (French for Cyprus), where the dominant note is oakmoss and wood. And finally oriental, soft, sensual, usually with a note of powder which comes from orris. Before she creates a new perfume, Maggie has a picture of it in her head. It can take anything from weeks to years to dream up a new fragrance. "I am interested in telling a story through the perfumes which evoke emotions, delight the senses and create a sense of wonder," she says

.Maggie finally set up her own perfume company Cloon Keen Atelier in 2002. Today, nine years on, the Galway based company is launching their very first artisan perfume, Bataille de Fleurs, which was developed with master perfumer Stephanie Bakouche."It was very important for us to start out journey in the South of France," she says "As the home of perfumery, the history and the tradition of this area is such a huge inspiration for us. This perfume is named after the French carnival along the Promenade des Anglaise - the only flower carnival of its kind in the world .During the festival, the locals throw their very best flowers at the rich tourists who come to visit and the smell - mimosa and jasmine mixed with the fresh sea air is something that we tried to capture."

Maggie is among those rare individuals helping to free us from the stranglehold of the flashiest fragrance counters at the big department stores. Companies like hers are slowly but surely gaining a cult following and many offer real scent in a bottle, rather than the mass-produced perfumes which are starting to get up all our noses. "You know – this was never about money or profit, "she says "It’s all about passion, creativity and, of course, wonderful scents."

Bataille de Fleurs will be available from the Cloon keen Atelier boutique, Arnotts, Dublin and from their website http://www.cloonkeenatelier.com/ 

 ^{50ml for 70 euro.}