Do you ever get that sudden jolt - that lightbulb moment - in which you realise that the way you've been doing something for a lifetime is, in fact, hmmm - wrong? This very thing happened to me recently, at a dinner celebrating the forthcoming new fragrance launch from Estee Lauder, Modern Muse, which launches this September. 

Over petit fours, I began to quiz Harry Frémont, Master Perfumer, for Fermenich and the man who developed the olfactory formula for Modern Muse - about the secret world of scent - how to wear it, how to smell it, the magic of Grasse, his favourite flower (iris).

And then he sprung it on me. The way I've been applying my scent since the heady days of White Musk by the Body Shop, is incorrect. You see, without thinking, after the habitual three squirts on my neck, I spritz my left wrist and, in what can best be described as an involuntary movement, then I immediately press my right wrist against the left. 'You shouldn't press the wrists together,' Harry tells me. 'It's like watching a film but starting it in the middle.' Scents must be allowed to develop and evolve, he tells me, and this starts from the second it hits your wrist and the particles flurry up into the air. Pressing your wrists together blots out the first part of a scent's life on the skin.

Now I liberally spray both wrists and I am certain it's made the potency of my scent last far longer. 

But that's not all. He has some game-changing advice for the way we shop for fragrance too. Spraying several scents on different sections of your arms, hands, boyfriend's arms or elbows is no good - well, not if you're testing out more than two scents in one go. 'The brain can only decipher two opposing smells in one instant,' Harry says. So spraying three, four or five at the same time and attempting to select your favourite is impossible - you'll need to go back and smell the first one again. 

Makes sense. Despite scent and memory being one of the most strongly interconnected parts of the brain network, our short term olfactory memory is pants. Talk then turned back to the very idiosyncratic act of applying your fragrance each day. Acutely aware that mine was about to get an overhaul, Karyn Khoury, the legendary senior vice president of Estee Lauder fragrances chimed in with something genius, 'I spray it on the back of my knees - because scent rises.'

Fragrant knees. How fabulous is that?