TIMEKEEPING AND ELEGANCE

With this apposite version of the Duomètre Quantième Lunaire, Jaeger-LeCoultre shows how aesthetic choices can influence the clarity of the dial.

Playing with contrasts to affirm your personality. The principle, used in the world of fashion, also applies in top-of-the-range watchmaking. And so Jaeger-LeCoultre has given a new face to its Duomètre Quantième Lunaire, first launched in 2010. The recipe is simple. The hand-grained and silver finish on the original dial has given way to a grey opaline, similar to a grey magnetite, a mineral in the spinel family. The result? The watch has gained in personality, while reading the time information is now a pure joy thanks to the contrast produced by the rose gold hands and indices.

The Duomètre Quantième Lunaire still displays the hours and minutes, the date and the moon phase on two separate discs. The seconde foudroyante hand that moves in leaps of 1/6th of a second has kept its strategic and purely aesthetic position in another disc at 6 o’clock. This sublime watchmaking composition is the setting for a large central second hand of great finesse.

Excellence is still the watchword for the mechanism, protected by a case that is also made of rose gold. The timepiece is powered by the innovative 381 Jaeger-Lecoultre movement and its Dual-Wing architecture, which stands out through the presence of two independent sources of energy. A first barrel, dedicated to the balance, guarantees precision, while another is used to display all the time data. This unique architecture means that when the crown is pulled out, the balance continues to work. When combined with the presence of a “jumping seconds” system that can be used to stop the two second hands at the same time and reset them to zero, it guarantees perfect synchronisation when resetting the time.

Price: 40 400 EUR www.jaeger-lecoultre.com

By Dan Diaconu