Can perfume really help a woman get her man? After all, by the time a guy is hooked, it matters little whether she’s wearing Novaya Zarya’s Lights of Moscow or Chanel’s Cuir de Russie. There’s little hard evidence to suggest scent is any more powerful than other dating tactics, such as laughing at his jokes and showing a bit of cleavage.

Yet the power of attraction is one of the foundations on which the fragrance industry is built — spray on our perfume and you’ll be irresistible. As a fragrance obsessive, this certainly works for me. I’m utterly fixated by the scents women wear, and have spent a lifetime investigating why.

By definition, a killer fragrance (or, if we are being scientific, an attractant) has to work on the first date and, given that scents change continuously as you wear them, timing is everything. Marketing experts say people pick their perfume in seconds, and fragrance firms spend most of their cash perfecting the haze we smell first. But top notes are of no great use in seduction: if your beloved is right there when you step out of the shower, you don’t need a mating strategy.

If you plan to set the pace early, your perfume needs to act at a distance. The French call this sillage, which roughly translates as wake, but could also be called radiance. This is the scent you leave behind when you leave a room. According to perfumers, radiance is a largely fortuitous thing, not unlike the catchiness of a tune: easy to recognise, but hard to engineer.

The radiance of classical fragrances does not need to be pleasant, merely distinctive. Givenchy’s Amarige d’Amour, for example, is all radiance, a strident tuberose-lavender accord that sings the perfumery equivalent of trumpet calls at a tournament. Wear that, Giorgio, or Mugler’s Angel, and for better or for worse, you will be hard to miss.

Prefer something more subtle? Some perfumes born in the eclipse of the 1990s, when nobody actually admitted to liking fragrance, are stealthily radiant. The oddly nondescript CK One, quiet up close, broadcasts a shimmering perfumery pianissimo around the room. L’Eau d’Issey by Issey Miyake, a seemingly skimpy little floral, contains a phenomenally powerful marine synthetic that smells at any distance, in the same way earphones make a faraway hum on someone else’s head. The trouble with these perfumes is that they are like ceiling speakers: assuming someone likes the music, they can’t tell where it is coming from.

If you are prepared to bide your time and wait a few hours, you need intelligent heart notes. These work well in the middle distance of a relationship, say facing each other across a table over a couple of candles and wine glasses, while awaiting a brace of tournedos Rossini. Big sillage fragrances are unhelpful here because, like operatic make-up, they work better at a distance, and they can get in the way of other earthly pleasures. The great perfumer Guy Robert once said he believed the success of chypre fragrances (Guerlain’s Mitsouko, Alix Grès’s Cabochard, Balmain’s Jolie Madame and countless others) was due to the fact that they agreed with food and wine.

This may be a very French set of priorities, but it is broadly true that, around a dining table, no fragrance should speak out of turn. The scents that work well in this context are the ones that have something to say, those in which the perfumer has managed to bottle some intelligence and beauty. Which ones are they? No advice replaces experimentation, but start with perfumes that have been around for a few decades: they seldom survive by accident.

Finally, we come to the finishing straight, the last inch that separates your new lover’s lips from the nape of your neck. Unless you have made the mistake of spraying on more perfume during the evening — a time shift that induces the olfactory equivalent of jet lag — what matters here is the dry-down, the last note a fragrance sings before fading away. As perfume time moves on, its creator’s palette shrinks from several thousand ingredients to a few dozen. This may seem meagre until you realise how much you can do by just varying the proportions of, for example, vanilla, patchouli and indole. Cheap fragrances typically run out of puff by now, and many of the long-lasting greats have recently been hampered by legislation restricting the use of certain (reputedly allergenic) substances.

A dry-down should be mysterious or appetising — both if possible. In the former category belong classics such as Patou’s Joy, Chanel No 5 and Piguet’s Bandit, as well as modern masterpieces like Bulgari Black. In the latter, Guerlain’s Shalimar and Bond No 9’s Chinatown. Which scent has it all? Ask any perfumer or fragrance addict, and you will likely get the same answer: Guerlain’s Mitsouko.

Guerlain is rumoured to be hard at work reformulating it, so buy it now as its creator intended. But beware, once you have smelt something this good, you may never again look upon fragrance as a lure, and instead love it for what it was all along: the most underrated form of art.

The Secret of Scent by Luca Turin is out now (Faber £12.99)

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