What kind of man wears perfume? When he's not smelling of fly-spray, Roy Colbert has been known to splash some around.
I'll eat any statistic that comes down the pipe, so when I read in a Sunday paper last year that 50% of the world's perfume sold was for men, I decided it was time I got a piece of the action.
Extensive research revealed the women/men scent split was closer to 70/30, but no matter, 30% still seemed remarkably high, even if England's Daily Mail tried to peg one back for staunch guys by claiming one third of men's scent is actually worn by women.
And of course any male sales statistic would have been buoyed by millions of women trying to get their men away from Old Spice and Brut.
What a skanky old pair those two are.
I must have received Brut as a birthday or Christmas present every year from 16 to 40, boys and men being so hard to buy for after all.
But save using the very first bottle a couple of times at high school when going somewhere where I thought there'd be girls, and using it in later years to oil hinges, I never touched a drop of the stuff.
But I have always liked women's perfume, and it was on the annual perfume-buying expedition for my wife last Christmas that I strayed into the men's section of the cosmetics counter.
A dozen sample squirts, 20 questions, and some Google reading at home later, I was a world expert on the subject.
I began buying sample bottles on TradeMe to find out what I really liked, what I could live with until a 100ml bottle was empty.
Envy by Gucci was an early favourite.
It wasn't as Marlboro Man as many of the male perfumes, scent designed to be worn by tall men on big horses.
This was not a look a man three feet high and nine inches wide could pull off.
So I bought Envy, which my untrained nostrils decided fell somewhere between feminine and genderless.
Though to be fair, my nostrils were being trained a little.
Once, as a dummy patient at the hospital for registrars practising for their clinical examination, I detected two Ralph Lauren Polos and one Christian Dior Eau Sauvage.
I had been dabbling in various fragrances for about seven months when the topic came up in conversation one night.
"I don't think I would be interested in a man who wore perfume," sniffed my wife.
It seemed as good a time as any to mention I had been wearing men's perfume for seven months.
My wife has a very weak sense of smell, so she could be forgiven.
But she was on high alert from then on.
"Is that fly spray I can smell?" she would ask when I swanned elegantly into the lounge bristling with Attitude by Armani.
"What have you been trying to kill?"
I could have answered that her favourite All Black, one of the hard men, not a nancy-boy back, wore Le Male by Jean Paul Gaultier.
Instead I extended my TradeMe buying sprees to buying her little bottles as well.
And soon her dressing table legs were bowed under their weight.
In August she returned from a school drama trip to Japan.
"I have bought you a present," she announced, her own Insolence by Guerlain unmistakable.
It was L'Eau D'Issey Pour Homme by Issey Miyake, one of Japan's very finest.
"I tried a few and I really liked this one," she said.
It was lovely. Top notes of citron, coriander, mandarin, clary sage and fresh verbena, and base notes of tobacco amber, musk, Indian sandalwood, Haitian vetiver and cypriol.
I would be killing a lot of flies with this one.
Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
