You can't ask me that: should 'do I smell?' be a question we ask more often?

Of all the senses, the sense of smell is perhaps the most underrated. In art and literature, sight and sound reign supreme. Touch is often invoked in a romantic sense. But smell? Not so much. Unless the whiff in question is like that of a rose, we tend to steer clear of the subject.

And yet, arguably, the way things – particularly people – smell is far more important than kind eyes or a mellifluous voice or a pair of nice soft hands. Our sense of smell has the ability to send us wild with desire or make us run away gagging with a hankie pressed firmly to our faces.

Smell is the first sense we rely on. Though it can barely focus its eyes until it’s a month old, a baby is able to recognise its mother by her smell as soon as it is born. Smell keeps us from getting ill from eating something we shouldn’t have by helping us recognise when something’s not ripe or, worse, has gone off. Without smell, taste would be nothing more than salty, sweet, sour or bitter. Smell even helps us to find a suitable mate – someone whose DNA is complimentary to our own – in the hope of having strong healthy offspring. It’s not in his kiss, Cher, it’s in the way he smells.

And yet our sense of smell can work against us. There are times when we can’t block out the messages it sends us even though we’re unable to act on them. In the office, for example. Smells are particularly important in an office environment but when we talk about good working conditions, the smell of a place is usually way down the agenda after back-friendly chairs, a properly set-up desk and good lighting. Yet there’s nothing so soul-destroying as having to spend most of your waking hours downwind from someone whose breath can strip wallpaper or whose BO could be classed as an offensive weapon. Especially when you can’t even take your nose to the office kitchen for a break because someone has been heating blue cheese and kippers in the shared microwave.

So how do you deal with bad smells in the workplace, when your nose is pointing you towards the door but you’ve got to stay and pay the mortgage? It’s been a staple dilemma of agony columns since agony columns began. Let’s start with those very human odours. When the cause of distress is bad breath or BO, the answer is not “leave an anonymous note saying ‘you stink’ on the smelly person’s desk”. It is, of course, “leave it to management”.

If you’re unfortunate enough to be the management, recruitment firm Agency Central suggests on its website that you take the offending employee aside in private and, having established that there’s no medical condition behind the nasty odour, gently let them know that things have been said. Say it in a friendly way. Humour can make things easier. Maybe even offer them a spritz of your Right Guard to underline the message (I’m paraphrasing). Do it at the end of the day so “they aren’t spending the rest of the work day sitting in a pool of shame and self-loathing”. Phew. That’s easy, then. No wonder so many people take the passive aggressive option of ostentatiously squirting spray deodorant in the offender’s general direction.

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But it’s not only what we traditionally consider to be “bad” smells that cause a problem at work. Just as difficult to bear can be those smells that are actually supposed to be pleasant. Pine-scented air fresheners. Lemon-fragranced cleaning products. Those weird “stick in a bottle” room ambiance things. Perfume… Perfume and aftershave are particularly tricky because their appeal, or lack of it, is so subjective, as anyone who lived through the Dior Poison years knows only too well.

My first boyfriend bought me Chanel No 5. The current incumbent thinks the classic eau de toilette that I wore throughout my teens and early twenties “smells of little old ladies”. At the same time, to me Miss Dior smells like the feet of a three-day-old corpse that died by drowning. I do not know why. Maybe I first caught a whiff of it while watching Silent Witness. Suffice to say, I once abandoned a trolley full of shopping in Waitrose because someone wearing the vile stuff stood behind me in the queue.

Perfume is impossible. How do you tell someone you hate the scent they think makes them irresistible? Maybe you don’t tell them anything? Each to their own, you’re thinking. Fight fire with fire and douse yourself in a scent you do like before you go into the meeting? Wrong. While the garlic breath of Barry from accounts isn’t going to kill anybody, employers ignore the negative impact of perfume and aftershave in the workplace at their peril.

Obviously any perfume used in excess becomes egregious but the problem is multiplied if you’re actually allergic to the stuff. What if it doesn’t just make you wrinkle your nose but brings you out in a rash? Sufferers of “chemical sensitivity” believe that common ingredients in many perfumes cause them all manner of unpleasant symptoms including dizziness, fatigue, headaches, nausea and diarrhoea, making it all but impossible for them to work alongside a nose-blind super-squirter who gets through a bottle of the smelly stuff a week.

In 2007 City of Detroit employee Susan McBride found that a co-worker’s perfume made her throat “close a little”, she quickly complained to her employer. When her employer failed to act on the complaint, McBride filed a lawsuit under the Americans with Disabilities Act, saying that her colleague’s perfume was actually making it difficult to breathe. Also citing the act, the City of Detroit countered by saying that McBride’s perfume allergy did not impact on any “major life activity”. Thankfully for McBride, a judge ruled that breathing did indeed qualify as a “major life activity” and she was awarded $100,000. Needless to say, the City of Detroit quickly rolled out a scent-free policy.

Fashion designer Coco Chanel is attributed with having said: “A woman who doesn’t wear perfume has no future.” That would no longer appear to be the case if your vision of the future involves climbing the career ladder at one of the many US and Canadian companies that followed the City of Detroit’s example and banned their employees from using highly perfumed toiletries in the wake of the McBride hearing.

Will the UK go the same way? Perfume is big business and for many people the idea of a day without fragrance is unthinkable.

At this time of year, the big brands start pushing their wares with a vengeance. Glossy ads and televisual extravaganzas promise that you too could harness the transformative power of a designer name’s allure for the entry price of a fifty-quid bottle of eau de toilette. As perfume maven Estee Lauder said: “Perfume is like a new dress. It makes you quite simply marvellous.” Only far more cheaply than a designer frock. Perfume is an easy, lazy present so long as you get the right one. It’s not going away any time soon. Just remember, one woman’s Coco Mademoiselle is another person’s Coco’s Granny.

Christine Manby has written numerous novels including ‘The Worst Case Scenario Cookery Club’