Lindsay Petersen is a native of Leeds, Alabama, where she grew up feeling she had been born a century too late – and likely even in the wrong Leeds.

She's lived all over the world, but most enjoyed Paris, where she studied the French allure of l'amour, and Delhi where she won a coveted first in her studies of the Kama Sutra, excelling especially in her lab work.

Since her glory days in academia she has focused her impressive energies on motorcars, gourmanderie, oenology, and expressing the muses of poetry, song and dance. Of her paintings it's been said that they're worth a million words. Those who read her prose value her words more than a thousand pictures ("Math can be a challenge!" she smiles).

As a sideline she extensively investigated emollients, trying to determine just how soft her skin could be ("Wonderfully so!" exclaims her husband) in her monograph, "Fifty Grades of Shea."

Lindsay's exploits are hardly unique in her family. Legend has it that it was her great-grandmother Thelma who suggested to Coco Chanel some changes to Chanel Number 4. The rest, as they say, is history. Should you meet her uncle ask him for the tale of Formula 408.

So finely tuned are Lindsay's senses of taste and smell that, when laboratories find spectroscopes need calibration, Lindsay is called in because extraordinary perceptions are recognized worldwide as the benchmark for spectroscopes. It has even been proposed that their sensitivity be denoted in 'petersens.'

She lives and travels with her husband, who called himself "the luckiest man in the world." Lindsay Petersen agrees with him.