There’s a brilliant bit in Woody Allen’s 1980 classic Stardust Memories, where the neurotic director nuzzles up to Charlotte Rampling. “Mmm, you smell nice,” La Rampling says seductively. “That aftershave. It just made my whole childhood come back with a sudden Proustian rush.”

“Yeah?” Allen replies. “That’s because I’m wearing Proustian Rush by Chanel. It was reduced. I got a vat of it.”

Twenty-seven years ago, this was a very funny line, not least because it seemed wholly ridiculous that a girly 19th-century French author should have his own signature fragrance.

But, guess what? Proustian Rush by Chanel might not be such a silly idea after all, especially when you learn that, last October, the bodice-ripper author Danielle Steel launched Danielle, paving the way for other literature-related celebrity fragrances. How long before we get Hogwarts by JK Rowling (“smells of hogs and warts”), or Tally-ho! by Jilly Cooper (“top notes of saddle soap mingling with damp labrador”)? These days, pretty much anyone with even the teeniest profile can have a signature fragrance.

You’ve all heard about Glow by Jennifer Lopez and Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds, each with world sales of £500m. And your nose would have to have been downwind of a sirocco not to have caught the saccharine, loo-cleaner whiff of celebrity perfumes by Britney Spears, Sean “P Diddy” Combs, David and Victoria Beckham, Paris Hilton and Kylie Minogue, who have all helped to make celeb-endorsed offerings the fastest-growing segment of the £12 billion global fragrance market.

Anyway, this got me thinking. If all these celebs can have their own perfumes, why couldn’t Yasmin and moi make like Andre and Steffi and launch our own signature his’n’hers bouquets?

I mean, we have profile. In the 1980s, my wife appeared in a Brother Beyond video, and not only am I a writer, like Steel, a few years ago, my wife and I presented a best new female fragrance packaging award at the FiFis (the Fragrance Foundation UK awards) in front of an audience that included Antony Costa from Blue. We are unmined celebrity-fragrance gold, and a two-handed perfume bearing our names, redolent of our tempestuous lifestyle, would surely put us up there with the likes of Coleen McLoughlin.

Our influences

According to a representative from Coty, the fragrance behemoth responsible for hugely successful celeb smells by Lopez, Sarah Jessica Parker and Gwen Stefani, the process begins with the celeb in question collating odorous influences, memories and inspirations.

I was born in Hull, so I felt compelled to have my signature cologne smelling of the proudly grim north of my youth. I wanted something manly, saturnine and potently unponcy; top notes of chip shop and docks, base notes of hard graft and sweaty manual labour, with hints of pub ashtrays and rain. My wife, my southern belle and olfactory flip side, wanted a reminder of her favourite Ibiza holidays. She imagined a beachy fragrance bursting with the scent of jasmine, Hawaiian Tropic, sea shells, baking-hot hire-car upholstery and the sweet, biscuity smell of her sun-baked puppy. We would be marketing these two fragrances using a magazine-friendly male-female, yin-yang, north-south, light-shade, happy-miserable, beauty-beast dynamic.

The process

We couldn’t afford to shell out £20,000 to create a bona fide bespoke fragrance, and the big perfume companies we approached couldn’t see a lucrative future in marketing our latent celebrity. So we headed to Toys R Us, where we purchased a kids’ Perfume Laboratory kit for £9.99. It contained plastic Petri dishes, a syringe and blotting paper saturated with jasmine, mint and eucalyptus, which must be great for anyone wanting to design a perfume that smells like a Vicks inhaler.

Undeterred, we added some of our own ingredients. Chip grease, male underarm sweat and rainwater for me; sun-tan cream, Ibizan sand from the bottom of a beach bag and crumbs from a packet of HobNobs for her. The results were . . . interesting.

“Celebrity fragrances tend to all smell the same, in much the same way that when you buy a cheap bottle of wine, it will taste the same as any other cheap bottle of wine,” says the perfume expert Roja Dove. “The formulas are synthetic. You don’t tend to get the subtlety of nature. You’re not talking about edgy, confrontational scents.” Well, Roja, I thought, this is where the game changes. I took a draught of my fragrance, all musky and lavatorial, and decided that it was indeed confrontational and rude with the subtleties of nature. Harvey Nicks, here we come.

The marketing concept

Now we needed to come up with names. I like the new wave of negative marketing concepts, where an apparently pejorative brand name is given to a fragrance to provoke a controversial response (such as Sean John’s Unforgivable). I toyed with Unbelievable, because my wife is always telling me that I am “absolutely f***ing unbelievable”, but eventually I went for Dark Satanic Mills, because it borrowed from a line in William Blake’s poem Jerusalem and happened to be my nickname at school. My reliably upbeat wife chose Ibiza Sunset.

Bottle design was next. I decided to go silver, functional and industrial (ie, cheap). Yasmin’s container was a feminine glass phial with a cute pink stopper.

We posed for an intimate advertising campaign that channelled the Posh and Becks fragrance commercial, accessorising with a bag of chips to make sure we were sending out an appropriately sophisticated message. I tried to look cross in the picture, which seems to be what sells. (P Diddy looks like he wants to start a fight in his ad.)

The street spritz

Not yet in the heady upper echelons of a scented league that provides a team of freelance “spritzers”, we grabbed our bottles and took to the streets. This was thoroughly humiliating and unrewarding. I mean, would David Beckham ever be caught spritzing passers-by? Worse still, comments were not exactly promising. “Unpleasantly oily, with undertones of cheap room spray” for Ibiza Sunset, while Dark Satanic Mills produced the kind of screwed-up facial response you might achieve with a blast of rapist-repelling Mace.

The launch

We had to have a launch party to unleash our product. The venue was the swish Berkeley hotel, in Belgravia, where Julien Macdonald has hosted parties, so we would be in esteemed company.

Actually, company was proving a problem. Our party was in August, when many of our target Alist guests were on holiday. Brad and Angelina, in town at the time, couldn’t make it. So we asked our fashionista friends and our eldest daughter, Laurie, instead.

Over tea, cakes and champagne, we respritzed, posed for the cameras like Big Brother contestants and schmoozed as if our careers depended on it. Guests were polite about our smells – in that they politely pretended not to have smelt them.

We had launched our very own signature fragrance brand to a very exclusive niche market. There was only one problem. As tragic nonebrity names peddling acrid, pound-shop pong in slapdash packaging, who were attempting to hoodwink shoppers with a cynically contrived marketing campaign, we really . . . stink.

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