One may be considered permanent and the other temporary but both class and form favour Kirsty Gilmour as she seeks to justify her top seeding at the Scottish Open Grand Prix this week.

The 22-year-old goes into the event at the venue where she set new standards by becoming the first Scot to reach a Commonwealth Games singles final as top seed for the second successive season.

She also does so having lost just four of 22 matches during the last two months, a run which included winning titles in the Czech Republic and Holland, as well as reaching the final of the Belgian Open.

Yet it is one of those few defeats that offered the latest strong indication of her potential as she came tantalisingly close to a second successive victory over the world’s best player.

Having lost three previous matches to Carolina Marin, including the finals at the London Grand Prix Gold and Scottish Open Grand Prix in 2013, the Scot beat her Spanish rival in the final of her home Open in Madrid last year.

That success took on added significance when Marin then won the World Championships later that summer, a title she retained this year reinforcing her world no.1 status and suggesting she had moved clear of the rest of Europe’s best.

Yet when they met in the second round of the French Open a month ago Gilmour, having lost the first set, rattled through the second 21-7 and seemed set to shock the world number one on racing into a 14-9 lead in the decider, before Marin showed her mettle to recover.

“It was the best set and a half of badminton I’ve ever played,” is Gilmour’s assessment.

“I just felt confident on court, that anything she threw at me I could cope with. My defence was very good and she’s a very attacking player, so you just have to hold out and wait for your opportunity to come up. She’s not a robot, she’s a human… a very, very good player, but it was a very good little tester for me.”

In the end she could not quite get there that day, then, but just as Marin has proved there was no fluke to the way she overcame the previously dominant Asian players when winning the world title, so Gilmour must draw upon having shown herself and everyone else that being able to subdue the Spaniard was no one-off.

The irrefutable logic is, too, that she should be able to start challenging the top Asian players, something she has found difficult to date.

While her push to find form ahead of the Commonwealth Games took her into the world’s top 16, another all-time best by a Scot, Gilmour suffered a disappointment at last year’s Scottish Open Grand Prix when she was knocked out at the semi-final by Japan’s Sayaka Sato, who had previously been as high as 14th in the world but was unseeded.

“There’s less dangerous lower seeded Asian players floating around the draw this year and the two I’ve identified have to play each other in the first round so that’ll get rid of one of them,” she laughed.

That speaks to a slight on-going nervousness about the depth of quality generated in Asia which Gilmour recognises and she believes she is beginning, as Marin has before her, to address the issue of demystifying players from that part of the world.

“I don’t think it’s a case of catch up, though,” Gilmour observes.

“Everyone develops at different rates and she absolutely sky-rocketed. I’m taking on more of a classical European development route. Mid to late twenties is maybe where I’ll start to come out.

“I might have some days where I can perform like that but I’ve not found that real consistency in my game. You need exposure to these top players and I think I need 10 more games like that. Carolina has all that experience already. I’m yet to gain it. Her mentality is unbelievable. She just goes on and steam trains through with unwavering self-belief. It’s incredible. I’m starting to build a bit of that too.

“Anyone I step on the court against it’s not like ‘I’ll try my best,’ I’m feeling that I’m good enough and here to prove that I can win this. You have to take away that cautiousness.”

A change of coach in the past year could also have been unsettling as Yvette Yun Luo, Gilmour’s mentor through her late teens to whom she acknowledges she has a huge debt, left the Badminton Scotland staff.

The choice of successor was in some ways a surprising one, but Chris Bruil, a Dutchman who was originally recruited last year to help with doubles play in particular, had impressed Gilmour and she argued for his retention to work with her.

“When Yvette left in June I looked back at the time we’d worked together before the Games and I just remembered really, really enjoying it,” she said.

“I liked his manner on court, I liked his manner on court, I liked his new exercises, I liked his mentality towards the game and his management of me at the Games because it was the biggest thing I’d done so far.

“Coaching should be a collaboration. We’re all adults now so it is very much a collaboration. We talk about what we want to work on together.”

Indications so far have been that it was the right move and Gilmour is keen this week to reinforce that impression on home soil by going one better than she ever has at the Emirates Arena before.