Brain candy

At press events/releases/launches in India, there are Bimbos who are required to drape themselves attractively around CEOs and generally provide eye-candy. In the interests of sanity, they are expected never to speak, only to smile glacially or clap their hands as a cue for the audience. On the rare occasions they DO speak (because they are the emcees for the event) they can be relied on to say the most inane things.

It's very different here at BaselWorld. though it's easy at first to be deceived. At watch launches, the attractive woman in question looks like a bimbette from afar, smiles stupidly at everything the CEO says (and he refers patronisingly to her by saying, "Now the beautiful woman to my left will open the case..." and such like) and claps a lot. But be not befooled, she's an ambassador for the company and she knows it, and she does her job better than you can imagine.

I know this because after a Raymond Weil launch, we were doing the leering Indian male routine, going up to the Eye-Candy Woman with smarmy smiles and saying dumb things like "Your watches are so beautiful, were they crafted by God Himself?" Then, more for conversation than anything, we pointed at a random timepiece, one of several on display, and said, "How lovely that one is!" Whereupon the putative bimbette said:

"Oh, that! Yes, brilliant, isn't it? I especially love the way the rose gold tint reflects off the ivory markings. But you know what the really interesting thing about that model is - the fact that they constructed a three-layered dial despite working with mechanical movement etc etc etc etc"

Exeunt feature writer and marketing man, chastened and de-chauvinisted.