IF YOU’VE been paying attention you will know that a new perfume is launched every nanosecond. You could, if you were daft enough and had the means, be spraying yourself or your nearest and dearest with something divertingly new all day, every day.

But this sensory saturation tends to make me less, not more, inclined to splash out on anything new. I think it’s called fragrance fatigue. I stick to my old and trusted friends (mostly, it has to be said, the grand and wonderful house of Guerlain) and regard most new arrivals on the olfactory scene with the friendliness of an Amazonian Indian coming upon a fact-finding anthropologist.

However, there are exceptions and one of them is Armani Prive — four gorgeous scents that Giorgio Armani is launching this week and which in the UK are to be sold only in his boutiques and in Harrods. In other countries, too, they will only be in Giorgio Armani boutiques and one or two other very special places such as Carla Sozzani’s 10 Corso Como boutique in Milan.

To give you the background: some years ago now Armani, preferring to wear a scent that nobody else was wearing, began to develop a collection of private fragrances. They were devised with only himself and his closest friends in mind. As he puts it: “My private collection of fragrances was to be just that: a collection I created to give as a gift to my close friends.”

There were lots of parameters laid down. First, price was definitely no object. He wanted only the finest, purest ingredients, most of them as natural as possible. And he wanted them to be complex perfumes, created in the grand tradition of fine scents. In other words, they were to be an “haute perfume” line, to be enjoyed by men as well as women. They were also to be intensely personal — connected with memories of events that had occurred throughout his life.

They were also to have a touch of the exotic. All his life Armani has enjoyed travelling to the East, exploring the souks and street markets of Tunisia and Morocco. In Tunisia he had long collected bottles of perfume that reminded him of a particular time and place. That is what he wanted his fragrances to do — to stimulate memories, evoke time, place, events.

He also wanted to make these fragrances in the old way — just him, working to create an intensely personal group of perfumes. It goes without saying that he wanted them to be sophisticated, unusual and elegant. Cute, in-your-face and brash are not the way Armani has ever gone about his clothing lines, and they had no place in his perfumes, either.

Just as a fashion collection offers something for many different moments, so Armani wanted this collection of fragrances to evoke different moods. For daytime he wanted something fresh — something that reminded him of clean linen. So he used a special calabrian bergamot, to which he added spice from Madagascar, Bourbon vanilla for warmth, and neroli from Tunisia for that hint of the exotic that he loves. Eau de Jade is the result.

Then there is Pierre de Lune, probably the most feminine of them all but light and elegant, not overwhelming. It’s a floral fragrance built around cassia but with a special and exclusive synthetic called belambre, which “wakes up the cassia”. He sees the addition of a fine synthetic to this perfume as being analogous to the way he works in fashion — blending synthetics with natural fibres such as the finest cashmere.

Ambre Soie was inspired by the sensual feel of silk and the exotic markets of the East and North Africa. Armani sees it as a modern play on the magic potions of old. It’s a rich, dark, warm perfume and my personal favourite among the four. While amber is the base, there is a touch of patchouli and also cinnamon, cloves and Chinese ginger, which stop it being too heavy or cloying.

The fourth fragrance is Armani’s personal favourite, the one he wears all the time — Bois d’Encens. It brings back his childhood memories of going to church with his grandmother, when the smell of incense suffused the church.

These are the four perfumes that, until recently, only Armani and his closest friends could wear. The trouble was that they were soon besieged by other friends and acquaintances wanting to wear them. And this week, for the first time, those who can make it to one of the Giorgio Armani boutiques (or, in the UK, to Harrods) can buy them, too.

• Armani Prive is available at the Giorgio Armani Boutique, 37 Sloane Street, London SW1 (020-7235 6232) and Harrods from November 29. Price £120 each.

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