silk tie

Special Report: Well Appointed: Choosing a Scent That Suits Your Business Destination

This is because your everyday, ideal-for-the-office scent may be too light for the people you’re meeting with in Dubai or too strong for your colleagues in Tokyo.

“Taste for perfume has always been different from one country to the other,” said the Parisian perfumer Frédéric Malle, who founded the fragrance line Éditions de Parfums. “Despite the fact that the entire planet is now offering practically the same thing, these differences in taste remain and will remain. They’re deeply rooted in our cultures.”

Men aren’t exempt here. A scent can help a guy get noticed at the office the same way a standout silk tie can.

“Businessmen these days need an edge,” said Fabrice Penot, who co-founded the perfume line Le Labo. “Fragrance can bring that to them. Maybe they wouldn’t have worn it thirty years ago, but today they’re getting out of their comfort zone.”

Many traveling men and women, though, choose to go scentless in transit, as a courtesy to fellow airline passengers.

That includes Diane Venet, who organizes exhibits of fine jewelry and often travels to London, Paris and Miami. On the ground, she is a such a fan of Éditions de Parfums’ Carnal Flower that she ducks into the restroom before business lunches to reapply. “I put it on to be sure to be seducing,” she says. “It’s a great help. People tell me I have beautiful blue eyes, but I think the perfume is a great addition.”

But even she goes fragrance-free during flights. “I was sitting next to a lady while flying from Europe to America and didn’t like her perfume,” she said. “It was terrible.”

What to spritz when disembarking? It depends on where you’re going. The United States and Britain have basically the same preference for more understated scents that you shouldn’t be able to smell farther than a handshake away — whether it is Prada’s Infusion d’Iris for women or Calvin Klein’s Eternity for men.

When in Russia and the United Arab Emirates, though, dab on a heavier fragrance, advises Steven Gontarski, manager of the Scent Bar, a perfume shop in Los Angeles. He recommends oud-based scents like YSL’s M7 or Tom Ford’s Oud Wood for men in these places. (Oud comes from the wood of the tropical agar tree.)

“We have a customer who works in finance and does a lot of business in Dubai,” he said. “He was at a dinner and a colleague leaned in and said, ‘What you’re wearing is a Middle Eastern scent.’ It was a huge compliment.”

In South America and Africa, too, heavier scents are the mode. Stephanie Bruni, 42, a television commercial producer in New York who travels often to both continents, usually wears Le Labo Patchouli 24 or Le Labo Oud 27; she believes these two smell best when it’s hot. But when she works with people for the first time, she uses only scented body lotion.

“I don’t want to show up in a big cloud of perfume,” she said. “I don’t want to offend.”

In Asia, her view would be appreciated. “They think perfume shouldn’t be invasive,” said Trudi Loren, Estée Lauder’s vice president for corporate fragrance development worldwide. “It shouldn’t interrupt another’s personal space.” For women traveling there, she suggests gossamer florals like pureDKNY’s A Drop of Rose.

Khaled Nasr, 34, who works for a company that makes semiconductor equipment and microchips in Los Angeles, takes fresh-from-the-shower-smelling Creed’s Green Irish Tweed on his business trips to South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, even though he prefers stronger colognes in the United States. “You have to understand the culture and what they expect, and just go easy with it,” he said.

Beyond deciding which scents to bring, you also have to decide how to tote them.

Some perfume aficionados who also use only carry-on luggage buy special shatterproof cases for their allotted 3.4 fluid ounces, or 100 milliliters, of fragrance — like Le Labo’s metal container that can be engraved with your initials (for $135).

Others stockpile the atomizers they have received at department stores while sampling scents. Ms. Bruni travels with tiny amounts of two or three scents and a scented candle for her hotel room. She also spritzes her travel pillow. “It’s comforting,” she says, even if “people make fun of me.”

Of course, there is always a chance that the right scent will be awaiting you at check-in. Le Labo, for example, supplies the shampoo and body wash at all of the Park Hyatt hotels around the world. Evidently the hotelier is finding it a popular touch.

“I got a call from the big boss, and he was telling me their cost of amenities has increased dramatically,” Mr. Penot said. “People have been stealing more shampoos and shower gels.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/15/business/global/choosing-a-scent-that-suits-your-business-destination.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Off the Shelf: Why Red Flags Can Go Unnoticed

In “Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril” (Walker Company, $26), Margaret Heffernan argues that such failures are part of a “human phenomenon to which we all succumb in matters little and large.”

Ms. Heffernan, a former radio and television producer and a former C.E.O. of several multimedia companies, explores many ways why people can persist in failing to see problems. She wants to know, for example, “What are the forces at work that make us deny the big threats that stare us in the face?” and “Why, after any major failure or calamity, do voices always emerge saying they’d seen the danger, warned about the risk — but their warnings had gone unheeded?”

Part of the reason is that the brain’s cognitive limits don’t let us absorb everything we encounter, she writes, so we must filter what we take in.

Some of this filtering is beneficial. It “oils the wheels of social intercourse when we don’t see the spot on the silk tie, the girlfriend’s acne, or a neighbor’s squalor,” she writes. At a basic level, selective vision also helps us remain engaged and optimistic day to day.

But Ms. Heffernan is chiefly concerned with the dangerous effects of this blindness. She offers a wide range of examples, including spouses who ignored evidence of a partner’s adultery, homebuyers who took on excessive mortgage debt, and companies whose compliant employees assumed “levels of risk beyond their ability to recover.”

Writing in clear, flowing prose, she draws on psychological and neurological studies and interviews with executives, whistleblowers and white-collar criminals. She analyzes mechanisms that limit our vision — individually and collectively — and thus jeopardize our safety, economic well-being, moral grounding and emotional wholeness.

Love, ideology, fear and the impulse to obey and conform all play important roles in rendering us blind to the makings of personal tragedies and corporate collapses.

Information overload is also a big factor, especially in our technologically sophisticated age. Ms. Heffernan explains how multitasking and excessive stimulation, combined with exhaustion, restrict what we see and do.

We all know that it is harder to concentrate when we are tired. That’s because the brain is working so hard to stay alert that higher-order brain activity must be conserved and thus restricted, Ms. Heffernan explains.

The book offers numerous scientific findings and real-world answers about the consequences of this problem. For example, studies of the effects of sleep deprivation found that medical interns scheduled to work 24 hours at a stretch “increased their chances of stabbing themselves with a needle or a scalpel by 61 percent, their risk of crashing a car by 168 percent, and their risk of a near miss by 460 percent.”

Industrial engineers, air traffic controllers and the rest of us are no less susceptible to effects of exhaustion. In March 2005, an explosion at a BP refinery in Texas City, Tex., resulted in the deaths of 15 people. In looking back at the tragedy, Ms. Heffernan writes that the plant had gone through cost-cutting and that many of the operators in the refinery were simply too tired to see critical warning signs. The operator in front of the control board that day, she says, had been working 12-hour shifts, seven days a week for 29 consecutive days.

Not only does fatigue narrow our vision and reduce our effectiveness, Ms. Heffernan argues, but it can restrict our moral engagement. For example, Staff Sgt. Ivan L. Frederick II, who in 2004 was sentenced to prison for abusing inmates at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, was found to have worked 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, with few days off.

Fatigue was certainly not the only factor at Abu Ghraib, but the fact that Sgt. Frederick “was surrounded by colleagues just as ill-trained and just as exhausted,” the author says, “meant no one was awake enough to have any moral sensibility left.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=a721d1666686d9bac2e8881c97cb17d8

Special Report: Well Appointed: Choosing a Scent That Suits Your Business Destination

Off the Shelf: Why Red Flags Can Go Unnoticed

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