News reaches me of an interesting retail experiment taking place.

Hypnotic Shop is an installation by “sensual artists” Sam Bompas and Harry Parr at Browns Focus clothing store on London’s upmarket South Molton Street.

The idea is to use smells and subliminal messages to make people buy things, although it goes some way beyond pumping out baking smells, a la Tesco.

It starts with an optical window installation that uses “vertigo therapy” to pull you in, and then employs music which will make shoppers feel sexy while also making them less inclined to nick stuff.

So nothing like Kasabian, then.

Bompas and Parr have even “spiked” the shop with “micro-encapsulated vanilla scents” to be released as customers walk across the shop. American research has shown that when these kinds of “feminine” scents are released, sales of clothes can double. When the installation comes down on March 15, sales data will be analysed – or “crunched” as they say in the retail business – to see if it’s made any difference to profits.

Bompas and Parr are Old Etonians with quite a track record for this sort of bonkers behaviour. Their core business is actually jelly-making, and among their previous projects are a glow-in-the-dark alcoholic jelly created for Mark Ronson’s 33rd birthday party and a Willy Wonka-style chewing gum that changes flavours as you chew.

They’ve also created something called Alcoholic Architecture, a breathable mist of gin and tonic that you walk into – and then stagger out of looking for a taxi and a kebab. (Note to Janet Street-Porter: that’s the sort of rambling you should be promoting.)

“We worked with three doctors to calibrate the ratio of gin to tonic,” Bompas tells me. “If you were in the mist for 45 minutes, you would have had the equivalent of a large G&T. One of our experts was Dr Andrea Sella, a chemical explosives expert at University College London. With that much gin in the air, there was a risk of explosion.”

I must say I’m sorely tempted to hop on the next Megabus south to offer myself as a guinea pig to Bompas and Parr – and if I wake up back in Buchanan Street bus station wearing a basque and acid-pink Vera Wang pedal-pushers, we’ll know their hypno-shopping thing really works.