Lady Arpels Jour Enchanté

The Extraordinary Dials collection merges métiers d'art with the Maison’s jewelry and watchmaking expertise to give full form to its enchanting universe. Telling a love story or celebrating the benevolent bounty of nature, these pieces interpret the measurement of time as an appeal to the imagination. Lady Arpels Jour Enchanté  – a new limited-edition and numbered watch designed as miniature works of art – has just joined the collection. Blending technical prowess and vibrant tableaux of poetic grace, this three-dimensional scenes comes to life within a 41-mm case through an interplay of perspective celebrating Enchanted Nature. With this creation, the Maison brings to life a graceful silhouette picking flowers under the early morning sun. Light passes through generous leaves of white gold, plique-à-jour enamel and diamonds harboring a field of flowers aglow in dazzling colors. Set with yellow sapphires, these blossoms are rendered in relief thanks to a new technique developed by Van Cleef & Arpels to offer the illusion of a boundless flowerbed: façonné enamel. Meticulously hand-sculpted, the feminine figure in white gold spreads her wings made from sparkling, pearly-white plique-à-jour enamel for a luminous transparency effect. In the background, affixed to a sky exhibiting three nuances of turquoise, the sun gleams with the radiance of its precious stones: spessartites grenats, colored sapphires, or diamonds. Its rays are secured with a lifted setting, an innovative technique that creates the impression of stones suspended like dewdrops, with no visible attachment. The story continues on the back of the case, through an engraved decor illustrating the fairy taking flight. Two years of development and 180 hours of work were required to assemble this dial, a testimony to Van Cleef & Arpels’ ingenuity.