Hello, I'm Kirstie Young.

Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the Radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit bbc.co.uk-radio4.

My castaway this week is the Businesswoman Joe Malone.

If her name automatically conjures the citrusy scent of lime, basil and mandarin

or the spicy notes of amber and lavender, then you are doubtless one of the customers

who flock into the eponymous stores to buy the fragrances, candles and skin care

that have made her a household name.

Age just nine, she would grind sandalwood and strained juniper at the kitchen table.

17 years later, a who's who of fashionable London flocked to her discreet little salon in Chelsea

to be massaged with bespoke oils and engines.

Later still, she took the brand international.

And by the end of the 90s, fragrance had made her fortune.

She sold her business to the beauty beamoth Estee Lauder.

If this all sounds like a fragrant little fairy tale crisply wrapped

in a signature black grow grain bow, it isn't.

Severely dyslexic, she left school at 14.

Her dad was a talented painter but a chronic gambler too.

And home life was often a pretty hand to mouth existence.

Much later, and at a time in her life when she should have been enjoying her success,

not to mention her toddler son, she was diagnosed with a very aggressive form of breast cancer.

...