HITTING the RIGHT notes

Perfume in all its incarnations can lift or create a mood, evoke powerful memories or just make you smell really good. But how do you know which scent is the best fit for you?

Navigating the perfume hall of a department store or duty free can be an overwhelming experience – indeed, an assault on the senses – with so much marketing hype and so many scents clamouring for attention. That’s perhaps not the ideal way to choose one’s fragrance de jour, but the scent selection process is not always a rational experience to begin with.

‘You may feel that there can be no logic in your choice of perfumes because sense of smell is so emotional, but the fragrances you most enjoy will probably belong to just one or two of the 14 fragrance families,’ according to renowned ‘nose’ Michael Edwards, a British fragrance expert, author and founding editor of Fragrances of the World and its sumptuous annual reference book.

With an online database, is widely regarded as an olfactory bible, with more than 21,000 separate classifications to date. Michael is one of the only