Four years after unveiling the Midnight Planétarium, a men’s wristwatch featuring a working planetarium on its dial, Van Cleef & Arpels has returned with an original ladies’ version that solidifies the maison’s reputation as a master of “poetic complications.”
The dial of the stunning Lady Arpels Planétarium timepiece is anchored by a sun of 18k pink gold orbited by its three closest planets: Mercury (a sphere of pink mother-of-pearl), Venus (a green enamel bead), Earth (a ball of turquoise), and the moon (a brilliant-cut diamond). Remarkably, each heavenly body moves in real time: Mercury encircles the sun in 88 days, Venus in 224 days, and Earth in 365 days. (The moon, on the other hand, rotates around the Earth in 29.5 days.)
Endowed with an automatic movement equipped with an exclusive module developed in collaboration with the Dutch watchmaker Christiaan van der Klaauw, the celestial timepiece possesses a truly unique time display: a shooting star in rhodium-plated gold that appears against a backdrop of seven aventurine discs placed in concentric circles within the dial, several rotating individually with the watch movement.
The piece de resistance? All of this technical wizardry fits inside a 38 mm 18k white gold case flush with diamonds on a glittering all-diamond high jewelry bracelet. Talk about heavenly bodies!
$320,000; vancleefarpels.com
