The World’s Most Popular Perpetual Calendars
IWC / Jaeger LeCoultre / Patek Philippe
“Is the perpetual calendar useful? Of course, it makes the life of the fortunate a bit easier.“
Together with luxury watch market platform Chrono24 and Ebner Publishing (also known for WatchTime magazine), I started a company called Chronolytics to analyze and structure the behavioral data of Chrono24. We noticed that there was no real source of information regarding consumer behaviour in the watch market, so we decided to fill that gap for watch manufacturers.
Besides being a data vendor for the watch industry, Chronolytics also culls data that we consider to be of interest to watch fans.
In each week of March, we will show you the most popular complication timepieces based on the behavioral data we collected from watch enthusiasts. This data consists of millions of queries for watches, each performed by visitors of the biggest luxury watch market platform in the world. Check out our previous posts on the most popular GMT and moon-phase watches.
This week, we’re showing you the most popular perpetual calendars. You know the deal with non-perpetual calendars; you have to manually correct the date every month that doesn’t have 31 days. Some very clever guys in Switzerland therefore introduced the annual calendar complication. With this complication you can go from month to month without having to manually advance the date to the 1st after the 30th. Except for February — that still needs a manual correction.
This is where the perpetual calendar kicks in. This nifty complication is able to handle February perfectly as well and will go through all months without requiring correction except for in 2100. While dividable by 4, this year won’t be a leap year.
Is the perpetual calendar useful? Of course, it makes the life of the fortunate a bit easier. However, mechanical perpetual calendars do not come cheap.
The Top 5 Most Popular Perpetual Calendars
1. Patek Philippe Grand Complications
Patek Philippe is one of those companies that lives for complications and has two collections to show off its best watchmaking skills. There’s the Complications collection and the Grand Complications collection. In the Complications collection you will find timepieces with chronographs, moon phases and annual calendars. The Grand Complications collection is where you will find the perpetual calendars.
The Patek Philippe Grand Complication ref. 5270G is a 41mm timepiece that has a chronograph and perpetual calendar on board. The day, month, leap year and day/night indicators are all located in dedicated apertures on its silvery-opaline dial. A true work of art and evidently watch enthusiasts think so too.