There are watches and then there are timepieces, and company Van Cleef & Arpel have no truck with the former if one of their latest designs is anything to go by. Their Midnight Planétarium, which was recently unveiled at the annual Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie in Geneva, isn’t anything as crass as a mere watch, the wrist-adornment features a representation of the five planets closest to the sun.
The planets, as impressive as they are since they’re made with semi-precious gems, wouldn’t be that remarkable on their own but Van Cleef & Arpel have made sure that they rotate in the same manner (and at the same time-scale) as their real-world counterparts.
Thus, a complete rotation of Earth will take a year to complete and Saturn will take a full 29 years to complete its circumnavigation of the wrist dial. The outer planets were excluded, at least partly because of the size of the mechanism needed to create it and because many won’t live long enough to see a full rotation of Uranus, let alone Neptune.
This sort of design and innovative thought doesn’t come cheap though, you’re looking at $245,000 (around R2.7 million) to place this piece of art on your arm.
Source: The Verge