The sniff test

Secrets of a Beauty Queen is Stephanie Darling’s celebration of a life spent in the pursuit of beauty. Among her exotic behind-the-scenes stories of the world of beauty and luxury magazines, you’ll find hints and tips Darling has picked up over a lifetime of road-testing the latest and greatest treatments.

As Helen Keller once said: ‘Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across thousands of miles and all the years we have lived.’ Here Darling offers some useful tips on how to choose the right perfume and wear it well.

• Spray your fragrance on the palms of your hands so you get the benefit as well as those around you.

• If you are on the hunt for a new fragrance, sniff no more than three in one sitting, as your nose will go into meltdown.

• Once you have whittled it down to your new favourite, spray it into the crook of your arm and let it sit with you for a while.

• The trick is knowing that you need to like the way a fragrance smells first up, but also after it dries down.

• Don’t be afraid to venture out of your comfort zone. Just because you love florals doesn’t mean you can’t embrace an oriental.

• Smell everything, even the unexpected scents. I remember road testing some fragrances at a sitting and one of them was based on semen.  Yes, really.

• Keep your fragrances out of direct sunlight.

• Apply fragrance after you shower, but before you get dressed, so that the scent permeates your clothes.

• Educate your nose by doing a wine-tasting class. This will help you learn to pick the notes in fragrances.

• There’s so much variation in individual body chemistry that no scent will smell exactly alike on two people.

• Shop for fragrance in the morning, when your sense of smell is at its best.

• In order to prevent olfactory overload, when trying to choose a fragrance, hold a wool sweater to your nose and inhale three times between each fragrance.

• Wait 15 minutes for top notes to dissipate and an hour for the fragrance to develop fully.

• Go with three to five spritzes for an eau de toilette and stay with the same dose even if you are tempted to up it, because your nose gets used to a scent and stops registering it. You don’t want the fragrance to enter the room before you do.

• Hold the bottle as close to your skin as possible to avoid spraying the air rather than your skin with the fragrance.

• Wear fragrance on your pulse points (wrists, backs of knees, the crooks of elbows and behind your ears).

• To make the fragrance run the distance, try layering: wash with the gel, then apply the body lotion, and finally the fragrance itself.

• Don’t rub your wrists together as it crushes the delicate scent molecules.

• And in the inimitable words of HRH Coco Chanel, just remember: ‘A woman without perfume has no future.’