Of all the press releases to arrive on my desk, the best was surely the one that accompanied the launch of Britney Spears’ perfume Fantasy. “Britney Spears has the power of an enchantress,” it piped, “and her life is a modern-day fairy tale.” This was 2005, of course, before the head-shaving and the hospital visits, before the divorce and the custody battles. When Britney’s personal life went into freefall 18 months later, it seemed safe to assume that sales of her perfume would follow suit.

Last week, however, we learned that sales of Britney’s six fragrances - Curious, In Control, Curious Heart, Fantasy, Midnight Fantasy and Believe - have beaten those of more clean-cut celebrities such as Kylie, Jennifer Lopez and the Beckhams. Maybe she wasn’t lying about that enchantress thing.

We have been buying celebrity perfumes for decades, since Schiaparelli gave us a bottle shaped like Mae West in the 1930s. We have wanted to smell like Audrey Hepburn and Danielle Steel, like Joan Collins and Linda Evans. At times we have even wanted to smell like Celine Dion. It has been largely assumed that celebrity perfumes sell on the basis of aspiration.

However, with Britney’s fragrances raking in GBP13m last year in the UK alone (a sizeable share of a celebrity perfume market worth GBP67m),not to mention the continued success of perfumes by similarly tarnished celebrities Kate Moss and Paris Hilton, such purchases no longer carry that whiff of the wannabe. Indeed, many suspect that the dust kicked up around Spears’ chaotic personal life may even have helped sales, just as it arguably aided the success of her last album.

But in the world of celebrity perfume even this is nothing new - Britney is perhaps only the heir apparent to Elizabeth Taylor: multiple marriages, rehab, health problems, scandal and the biggest-selling celebrity perfumier of all time. As Joseph Ronchetti, the chief executive officer of Elizabeth Arden once explained to Time magazine: “Liz Taylor is an individual that a lot of people will relate to. We’ve all known people with drinking problems, we’ve all had weight problems, and she’s coped so beautifully.” And as Britney has shown, nothing sells as well as “coping beautifully”.