Scent of a woman comes with a choice of 18

For perfume maker Frederic Malle, you are what you smell. The founder of Editions de Parfums was in town for a Monday meet-and-greet at Joyce Beauty in Central and a very nose-in-the-air lunch yesterday with the town's society ladies, teaching them the subtleties of the olfactory system, by bringing along a 3-metre-high 'smelling column'.

'Most fragrances are smelled from a metre's distance from the person who puts it on,' Malle noted. 'So we spray the fragrance into this column, let the scent go around it and open this small window on the side to let the customer smell it.' This is likely to be a person's scent as other people smell it.

Apparently, the department-store method of holding a sprayed-on paper strip to your schnoz is not the proper way to appreciate a perfume. So, now that we know how to smell, what should we be smelling?

'The climate here is very damp, which makes fragrance easy to evaporate so you need a long-lasting but refreshing fragrance.' He then offered suggestions from the 18 perfumes he has created, such as Bigarade Concentre ('the light version of the cologne'), Geranium pour Monsieur ('a very uplifting fragrance') or Vetiver Extraordinaire ('one of my personal favourites'). Hopefully, this makes scents to you.