Secret watches, revealing precious moments

The watches Secret watches, also called “hiding watches”, are timepieces that appeared at the end of the Renaissance, a time when watchmaking was as much an art as a science in Europe.
The first examples of secret watches date back to the 16th century. At the time, they were luxury objects, reserved for the nobility and elites, which included mechanisms that concealed the dial or other secret compartments and sometimes even played a role in the transmission of confidential messages.

Enchanting mechanisms with extraordinary technicality 

Treasures of know-how and inventiveness, these watchmaking creations cleverly conceal the dial in a subtle game of hidden and revealed, where the time is read like a secret, revealed by a movement of the finger.
The complexity of secret watches lies in their ingenious mechanism of hidden buttons, slides and rotating covers. Some models featured more subtle hiding places, such as medallions concealing miniature portraits or compartments containing sweet words or symbols.
These coins are mostly produced in gold, silver, and in platinum due to their malleability and durability, decorated with intricate patterns of colored enamels, pearls, precious stones and refined engravings. Each watch is the result of hundreds of hours of meticulous work, from the selection of materials to the final assembly, to finally become true masterpieces arousing surprise and wonder upon their discovery.

Secret Watches Today

Today, secret watches continue to exert a singular fascination, although they are no longer used for the same reasons as in the past, they remain contemplative objects of great rarity to acquire for collectors, often the subject of limited editions. 

Houses such as Patek Philippe, Van Cleef & Arpels, Cartier or Jaeger-LeCoultre, revisit this concept with modern creations that sometimes integrate complex watchmaking complications, such as tourbillons, perpetual calendars, hidden biometric sensors and concealed digital displays, thus illustrating the fusion between their historical know-how and current technology.

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