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omen and their personal perfume preferences are inseparable. They wear them like confidence boosters before stepping out to take on the world.

“I feel more confident,” acknowledges designer Ina Thomas, whose favorites are Tova and Jo Malone.

And a woman’s distinctive choice of scent – whether floral or spice-infused –becomes her calling card.

“My friends tell me that the scent really suits me,” said model and presenter Sari Nila, who has favored the woody, vanilla-scented Eau des Merveilles from Hermès since 2004.

 “If my friends and my husband smell one of the scents, they know I’m around,” Ina said.

Personal preferences are one thing, but market trends mean that once popular scents go out of style (remember the now long-gone 1980s best-seller Obsession by Calvin Klein?).

Here are some of the long-lasting brands that remain eternal favorites.

Chanel No. 5

Imbued with jasmine, rose, sandalwood and vanilla, Chanel No. 5 is still hailed as one of the world’s most iconic perfumes.The story of its creation began in the late summer of 1920, when Coco Chanel took a vacation in the South of France on the Côte d’Azur with her lover, Grand Duke Dimtri Pavlovich. There, she met perfumer Ernest Beaux, who had worked for the Russian royal family and lived in Grasse, the center of France’s perfume industry.

Obsessed with creating a scent that could describe the new, modern woman, she challenged Beaux. After working for several months on the new fragrance, he finally came up with 10 samples – numbered one to five and 20 to 24 – and presented them to Chanel. She picked number five and the rest, as they say, is history. “Both the scent and the bottle are pure classics,” said Sari Nila.

Shalimar by Guerlain

Created by the Guerlain family’s third-generation perfumer, Jacques Guerlain, in 1925, many say Shalimar was the world’s first oriental fragrance, with its creation inspired by the 16th-century love story between Indian Emperor Shah Jahan and his wife, Mumtaz Mahal. The name Shalimar is taken from Mumtaz’s favorite gardens, the “Shalimar Gardens”. The perfume is composed of citrus notes, lemon and bergamot, jasmine, may rose, opoponax, Tonka bean, vanilla, iris, Peru balsam and gray amber.

Opium by Yves Saint Laurent

Opium is an oriental spicy fragrance whose creation in 1977 caused a bit of a stir. Due to its controversial name, some people accused the French designer of condoning drug use. This controversy, however, only helped the perfume in terms of becoming well-publicized, and it soon became a best seller. The perfume’s top notes include coriander, plum, citrus, mandarin orange, pepper, jasmine, cloves and bergamot. “My mother used to wear Opium. The bottle and scent are very iconic,” said Sari Nila.

Joy by Jean Patou

French perfumer Henri Alméras created the perfume in 1929 for Parisian couturier Jean Patou. Joy is considered the first example of the floral genre in perfumery as it is primarily a combination of jasmine and rose.

Arpège by Lanvin

Arpège is probably the best-known perfume in the world to have a familial origin, reflecting as it does the loving relationship between a mother and daughter. In 1927, Jeanne Lanvin asked French perfumers André Fraysse and Paul Vacher to create a perfume. She later gave it to her daughter, Marguerite, as a 13th birthday present, and asked her to name it.

Marguerite, already an accomplished musician at the time, called it Arpège or arpeggio, the more familiar Italian term, for a group of notes that are played one after the other, either going up or down the scale. The perfume contains high powdery floral notes, which combine honeysuckle, jasmine, rose and orange blossom, as well as lower accents of vanilla and sandalwood.

It is also known for its bottle, which features a drawing of Lanvin and her daughter by French artist Paul Iribe.