Good Scents

TRUST YOUR NOSE, says Edouard Dorize, business development manager of Aura Prestige, the company behind the new fragrance store Amaris. "The only way to find out what you like or dislike is to smell as many scents as you can. It's a similar process to wine appreciation, where you need to educate your palate."

This is common knowledge to seasoned fragrance enthusiasts who will spend top dollar for the most obscure or exclusive scents they can find. But not so to a wider group of people who may be intrigued by intrigued by luxury scents, but are too intimidated by the prices or the swanky stores that sell them, to learn more about what goes into these precious essences.

Mr Dorize wants to change that, which is why Aura Prestige - a distributor of fragrance and beauty products in South-East Asia - decided to launch Amaris in Singapore last December, with a second store in Kuala Lumpur opened early this year.