BY HARLAN CHAPMAN-GREEN
At 5.8mm thick, Bulgari’s Octo Finissimo Perpetual Calendar is the thinnest perpetual calendar piece on the market, a record it’s held since 2021. I’m surprised no one’s challenged it yet, perhaps even Bulgari’s ultra-thin competitors like Piaget, Vacheron Constantin, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Richard Mille, and now even Konstantin Chaykin are uninterested in claiming this title.
That leaves the Octo Finissimo alone at the top, but it hasn’t been forgotten up there as a new blue version has arrived.
Apart from the colour, the watch is unchanged. That means you’re getting a 40mm x 5.8mm titanium case and 30m of water resistance shaped in that iconic multi-layered octagonal square design. The sandblasted titanium has been PVD-coated to give it that cool blue finish, which matches with the wide tapering alligator leather strap (with titanium pin buckle). The dial is blue and is laid out clearly, with the date appearing as a retrograde at 12 O’clock, with day and month indicators below it and a retrograde leap year indicator at the very bottom. There’s no running seconds hand, no moonphase or anything else unnecessary, just all the information you need supplied through rhodium-plated hands and applied indices.
Behind the dial is the BVL 305 calibre. I usually like my watches to have a little heft to them so I can feel where the money’s going, but with Bulgari you can identify where your hard-earned cash has gone simply by how little of the watch there is despite its specifications. The BVL 305 calibre, which is based on the BVL 138 calibre, has 408 components and 35 jewels within and measures 36.6mm across and just 2.75mm thick. Despite its svelte stats, it still has a power reserve of 60 hours, which is kept wound up by a micro rotor. Barrels supplying over two days of power take up space in a movement, as does the micro rotor and its winding mechanism, and yet Bulgari still managed to make the calibre as thin as it is. The calibre GP4800 in Girard-Perregaux’s Laureato Fifty watches that Jovan wrote about recently is also a self-winding calibre and has 55 hours of power reserve, but that calibre is 4.28mm thick, and it’s a time-and-date-only movement. This is but a specification comparison, of course, but it’s good to have the Octo Finissimo’s numbers in context.
Overall, I really like where Bulgari was thinking with the Octo Finissimo Perpetual Calendar Blue PVD Titanium Ref. 104262; it’s a clean look, and it complements the range well. It’s a shame it’s limited to just 50 examples, though, and it would’ve been cool of them to PVD-treat the movement as well to give it a blue appearance, but its finishing is high quality, and it doesn’t let the side down without that colour. At a price of €76,000, this is a very interesting proposition indeed.
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