Perfumer Jo Malone says her sense of smell is as good as a labrador: ‘I could smell it was going to snow’

Jo Malone, the perfumer behind the Jo Malone fragrance brand, has claimed that her sense of smell is so acute that she received the same scores as medical detection dogs in a smell test.

The businesswoman went so far as to claim that her nose could predict the weather and detected her husband’s illness before doctors confirmed what was wrong.

Speaking on the Big Fish podcast, Malone, 59, said: “You know the medical detection dogs that can smell epilepsy, diabetes or even Covid? I went to Milton Keynes and had my nose tested with the dogs… in the pen with all the golden Labradors and spaniels.

“I hit with the top three dogs, I could smell what they were smelling.” She added that she is nicknamed “bloodhound” at home for her exceptional sense of smell.

Malone, who sold her brand Jo Malone London to Estee Lauder in 1999 for millions of pounds, said the “interesting thing” about people with a heightened sense of smell “is we can say what it is we are smelling”.

She recalled her husband Gary Wilcox falling “very, very sick” several years ago and she “noticed there was this really strange smell down his neck on the adrenal”.

“It smelt like a dirty, wet moss smell and I could smell it really strongly, and we went to the doctor’s and the doctor said, ‘No you can’t’, and I said, ‘I can’,” Malone claimed.

“Anyway, a few months later he nearly died and he had adrenal failure.”

Wilcox, who is also Malone’s business partner, suffered from a condition that affected his adrenal glands and had to undergo treatment to control his cortisol levels.

In the podcast, which was released on Wednesday (21 December), Malone told host Spencer Matthews that she knew Britain would be blanketed in snow before it happened.

“I can create fragrance, but I also could smell it was going to snow a few days ago – something in the air,” she said.

Malone said her sense of smell is particularly attuned due to synaesthesia, which is a neurological condition that causes senses to cross over, creating associations between senses that do not normally correlate.

The perfumer is severely dyslexic and grew up in a council home in Bexleyheath, Kent. She left school at the age of 13 to care for her disabled mother.

Malone was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s birthday honours list in 2018 for her services to the British economy and the GREAT Britain campaign, which promoted British creativity and industry abroad.

She was initially awarded an MBE in 2008 for her services to the beauty industry.

In 2003, Malone was diagnosed with breast cancer and temporarily lost her sense of smell after undergoing chemotherapy. She was 38 at the time and was given nine months to live, she told Matthews.

She said: “I sat on my bed and I thought, ‘Jo, you’ve never listened to anybody in your life tell you what you should do, who you should be, why are you now going to believe that someone’s going to give you nine months? Go fight’.

After a year of treatment, her cancer was in remission and Malone’s sense of smell returned.