Madonna is on the warpath after discovering that unflattering photographs of her Hard Candy pre-airbrushed album artwork have been leaked to the press.

Seeing as this is a woman who launches legal action if her children’s hands aren’t disinfected every half hour, one can only imagine how put out she might feel to discover that people no longer believe she stopped ageing in 1984.

Post-airbrushing, she looks vaguely more humanoid.

A few months ago, I was lucky enough to get my hands on a sample of a ruinously expensive and ludicrous new perfume that I think might temporarily solve Madonna’s problems with the natural ageing process and enable her to resist wearing clothes that would make a teenager look like mutton dressed as lamb.

Ageless Fantasy is an anti-ageing perfume which has been created in order to knock at least eight years off your age. Put the bottle down, Madonna, drinking it won’t improve its results. Billed as ‘the essence of youth’, it smells of citrus fruits, mangos and pomegranate; a bit like the popular drink-in-a-carton Um Bongo, in other words, but around £164.61 more expensive.

Apparently, scientists have concluded that in particular, the scent of pink grapefruits on a woman can give her an impression of youth. Just imagine, therefore, how young people would think you were if you hollowed out three or four and wore them as a citrus bikini and a jaunty hat. I suggest you try it forthwith.

The concept works on the basis that people, men in particular, associate certain scents with certain ages and can therefore be fooled into thinking women are younger if they detect a ‘youthful scent’ around them.

Women are slightly harder to trick. We associate the ‘youthful scent’ of a younger man with a great deal of cloying Lynx worn in lieu of bathing, or of a pervasive aroma of wet trainers, four-day-old polyester school shirts and egg sandwich-flecked bum fluff.

Even given the superior olfactory know-how of women, the only way I can imagine Ageless Fantasy really working is if you spray your date in the eyes with the perfume as soon as he arrives to pick you up.

Then, like Cinderella waiting for midnight, you’ll have to keep watching your man until the blinding effect starts to wear off at which point give it to him with both barrels with as many blasts as it takes for him to agree that you look as if you’re only 22.

Because I have a magic portrait ageing on my behalf in the attic (I’m actually 83), I don’t need gimmicks or trinkets to help me look any younger or more desirable, and any lurking persistently around the tropical fruit section at supermarkets is, I promise, purely incidental. I kept the sample, though. At the very least it means I can definitely keep going on the Club 18-30 holidays I so enjoy.