When Roja Dove recalls his childhood, he remembers mainly the way it smelled: the softly spiced cakes his mother would bake, the bluebells in his grandparents’ garden, the zesty bottles of cologne bought as gifts by friends in Paris.

Even now he has been known to be moved to tears by the smell of a particular plant that used to decorate the family home near Chichester, which is melodramatic perhaps but also understandable.

After all, one doesn’t become the world’s most famous fragrance “nose” without taking scent seriously.

Although he’d hardly approve of the comparison, 56-year-old Dove is a rock star in the heady world of perfume, with clients who pay up to £25,000 for one of his bespoke fragrances and fans who queue to have him sign bottles of scent from his hugely successful (and eye-wateringly pricey) range.

Born and raised in Sussex – he still has a house in Brighton – Dove grew up sneaking whiffs of the cologne his mother kept in her dressing room drawer and spending his pocket money on bottles of perfume at Emile’s, a shop in Chichester.

“I found scent utterly intriguing,” he says. “I was amazed that something so intoxicating could emerge from these tiny bottles.”

At 18, he began a medical degree at Cambridge, which he later abandoned when he was offered an apprenticeship at French perfume house Guerlain. The teenage Dove had made rather a pest of himself, badgering different branches of Guerlain for tips on becoming a parfumier and his efforts finally paid off.

One of the three cousins who ran the house had become so exasperated by mention of Dove’s name he asked the managing director what he should do. Amused, the managing director suggested they gave him a job. “They thought I’d be less trouble inside than out,”Dove recounts with a chuckle.

He’s rather reticent about what he learned during his time with Guerlain – perhaps, like a magician, one never gives away one’s tricks – but when he left the company two decades later, he had risen to the position of Global Ambassador, the first time someone outside the Guerlain family had been honoured with the role, and he had become known in the industry as the world’s only “professeur de parfum”.

These days he continues to be regarded as the leading expert in this very niche profession. There are more astronauts than master perfumers, he tells me, and he sees his work as a great privilege.

“I’m very fortunate in that I make something unlike any other thing one can make.

Perfume is not just part of the memory of the person who wears it but of all the people who know that person too. You can’t say that about a piece of jewellery or a dress or a lipstick.”

It’s not just Dove who is moved by its power. Scent often acts “like a key to unlock memory” and in his consultations with the clients who commission bespoke fragrances he often finds himself privy to personal revelations.

He recalls introducing an ingredient to one woman – “I never tell them what it is because that can colour their reaction” – and watching as she gasped in shock. The jasmine note had immediately reminded her of a hair pomade her mother would use on her in childhood. “She was very poor when she grew up and apparently this pomade was an enormous luxury. The moment she smelled it, she was a little girl again, in another continent on her way to school.”

Dove singles out the scents that resonate most positively with clients – and most of these preferences are formed when we are very young – and blends a fragrance that is “the perfect olfactory reflection of who they really are. Without really understanding why, it immediately makes them incredibly happy.”

When it comes to his own line, sold in his Harrods “haute parfumerie” alongside other fragrances “personally curated”

by Dove, he begins with a name, usually dreamt up over a cup of tea with his partner Peter. This being perfume, these are usually flighty monickers such as “Innuendo” and “Scandal”, the former a soft, powdery floral that invites people to come closer to the wearer, the latter a scent based around “heavy, sensual” white flowers – the sort of perfume people comment on.

And if that sounds fanciful, we then get to his latest project in which he has been tasked with recreating the scent that might have been carried in a Jacobean perfume bottle found in the Cheapside Hoard, a collection discovered by workmen in London in 1912 and set to go on show in its entirety at the Museum Of London next month.

In 2010, Dove created a bespoke scent to coincide with the V&A museum’s exhibition on Russian ballet impresario Diaghilev, who famously used perfumes to enhance the sensory experience of his ballets. He has approached this project with similar zeal and reels off a list of ingredients that have inspired him from jasmine, which was then considered very exotic, to less savoury elements such as the animal excretions ambergris and civet.

Perfume always reflects the period in which it was made, he says – think of the heavy, powerful fragrances of the brash 1980s or the minimal, unisex scents of the grungy 1990s – and he hopes his scent for the Cheapside Hoard exhibition will help transport visitors back to 17th-century England.

So how does a “nose” look after his nose, I wonder? Is it insured, like Betty Grable’s legs? He laughs the idea off.

The only real precaution he takes is avoiding spicy foods – and certain air stewardesses.

“I once had to ask the purser on a long-haul flight to move either me or the air stewardess because I couldn’t bear the smell of the perfume she was wearing, and she was wearing a lot of it.”

But like the dancer with a sprained ankle or the soprano with a sore throat, he will admit to being terrified of colds.

“Losing my sense of smell is incredibly distressing for me.

I feel almost claustrophobic.

Tragic really but, well, you can understand why.”

* For more on Roja Dove visit www.rojadove.com.

*The Cheapside Hoard exhibition opens at the Museum Of London on Friday, October 11. Visit www.museumoflondon.org.uk.