How do you know you’re in an Aesop store? Is it the golden-brown bottles, lined up perfectly against the walls, standing in formation like soldiers on parade? Is it the sink that beckons you to wash your hands with a sample of Reverence Aromatique scented with vetiver, petitgrain and bergamot? Is it the dimly lit interior, or the Helvetica font? Maybe it’s the quotes. The quotes, of great writers and philosophers, are everywhere: on bottles, walls, gift packs.

Here they are, for instance, in my tea cup. “Dare to err and to dream”, it reads, just inside the lip. It’s a line from Friedrich Schiller, a contemporary of Goethe.