KEY POINTS:
The truth is, the global economy can sometimes stink.
So the World Economic Forum is targeting the noses of the 2400 global leaders at the group's 38th annual meeting next week in Davos, Switzerland.
Perfume-pumping machines in the main conference halls will spray eight specially created fragrances such as Artemis and Lavender Fields to relieve any unpleasant aromas that settle on delegates, who include Chevron chief executive officer David O'Reilly, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
The creator of eau de Davos is Christophe Laudamiel, a French chemist who is senior perfumer at International Flavors & Fragrances. The New York-based company blends aromas for fashion houses such as Polo Ralph Lauren and makes the smell that makes a new car smell like a new car.
"WEF called in August and interviewed me for three hours to make sure I wasn't a weirdo," says Laudamiel, who earned his chemistry degree at the University of Strasbourg and was the chief "perfumer creator" at Procter & Gamble. "The invitation was a surprise. I'm more often asked by women what perfume they should wear to have guys jump them on the street."
The 38-year-old aroma engineer spent the next six months in his company's labs in Berlin and Manhattan, working with 2200 vials of potions and secretly constructing "chords and arpeggios" of scents to make the WEF perfumes that he says can trigger imagination without words.
Laudamiel's mission is to create and circulate aromatic moments that evoke the intimacy of the meeting, while helping delegates solve global calamities against a backdrop of crisis.
Paramount among what the WEF's 2008 programme portrays as a global "contagion" is the fall-out from lenders marking down more than US$80 billion after a surge in US sub-prime mortgage defaults.
"The aroma of sub-prime is an interesting concept and that's one of the reasons I'm fragrancing the rooms," Laudamiel says. "I want my perfumes to overcome the gloom."
Klaus Schwab, the WEF's 69-year-old founder and chairman, said: "It's important we leave sufficient room for the young people involved in the forum to develop seminars like this."
Then, with a smile on his face, Schwab says he has "no clue" how the perfume project came together.
The perfuming of Davos is raising some noses.
"It's downright bizarre," says WEF delegate Bill Margaritis, senior vice-president of investor relations at FedEx. "Travelling at great cost to the Swiss Alps to sniff perfume isn't going to play well back home. The last thing any CEO needs in this economic environment is to be caught on camera in a ski resort snorting perfume.
"What is WEF doing, trying to recreate the Oracle of Delphi by releasing vapours on delegates?"
Laudamiel says his Gigabyte perfume - "a scent created to inspire high tech and optimism" - will revitalise global leaders with "the fresh electricity of a computer store and the clean aroma of laundry".
His Happiness fragrance will envelop Kissinger and Dimon as they direct the upper echelons of politics and finance in seminars on "Military Power in the 21st Century" and "The Myths and Realities of Sovereign Wealth Funds".
And if the electricity it takes to spray Glacier perfume, "a tribute to the shrinking Arctic ice cap", and the 10.88kg of all the scents exceed the carbon emission reduction units of the Kyoto Protocol on the environment, the forum will calculate the cost overruns and donate the money for the purchase of solar cooking stoves in Yulin, China.
"I know a lot of people think this is foolish," says Toshiko Mori, chairwoman of Harvard University's architecture department and one of the WEF delegates who initiated the perfume project. "But the global economy is in dire straits and we must improve the quality of human spirits. Perfuming is a powerful tool in a much broader discourse. The fragrances will help us reach economic and political solutions at Davos."
Perfume historians say there's nothing odd about the deodorisation of Davos.
"Royalty of antiquity had perfumers attached to their court, preparing state feasts and entertainments," anthropologist Constance Classen says in her 1994 book Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell. "Perfume has the power to relieve anxiety, brighten dreams and heal the soul."
The WEF's aromatherapy policy, spelled out in a working paper titled The World Economic Forum Meets the World of Olfaction, promises a series of innovative scents concocted from the same ingredients that "embalmers have always had to gather from around the world, beyond political, cultural and racial boundaries". The document says the fragrances will be "floating in the congress meeting rooms".
Laudamiel's signature contribution to the forum is a perfume called Six Continents, to be released in the plenary room at the main Congress Centre.
"It's fresh and icy, subtle green notes with yellow fruits drenched in watery elements," he says. "Odours are the building blocks of class hierarchies and political orders."
Running his fingers through a short-cropped Mohawk hair-do in his Berlin lab, Laudamiel adds: "The powerful people coming to Davos need aroma."
As Six Continents and the other perfumes waft across the summit, delegates are supposed to "mutqqichini", an ancient Incan verb used to describe people smelling something together.
Paola Hjelt, the WEF's global leadership fellow in charge of fragrances, says Swiss security officials nonetheless have demanded a smell test before global leaders begin mutqqichining when the conference opens on January 23.
- Bloomberg
