These Watch Complications Are as Beautiful as They Are Useless

Why the useless fascinates us on the wrist

Some functions won’t change our diaries or our lateness, yet they turn a watch into a miniature mechanical theatre. In watchmaking, beauty sometimes has the courtesy of being useless. These are the complications that tell the story of the sky, tame gravity, bring a singing bird to life, or make the seconds jump with perfectly superfluous flair. They form a culture in their own right—one in which poetry is admired more than performance, and the object becomes a fragment of time to contemplate rather than to measure.

The tourbillon: gravity, staged

Designed by Breguet to counter the effects of gravity on pocket watches, the tourbillon has little left that is indispensable on the wrist, which is in constant motion. And yet—what presence. A cage that turns once a minute; a hypnotic tourbillon ballet of bevelled bridges, gilded wheels and blued hairsprings: the architecture is a statement of intent, a workshop signature. The carousel, its conceptual cousin, drives the point home: same objective, different staging. Here, the useless embraces its essential role—delivering emotion and telling the story of intelligent hands.

Equation of time: measuring the sun

You won’t make up a missed appointment with an equation of time. It will simply tell you that the sun is never perfectly aligned with our civil minutes: up to around +14 or −16 minutes of difference over the course of the year. Hidden inside the case, a cam shaped like an analemma orchestrates this celestial drift. On the dial, a subsidiary hand indicates it with aristocratic sangfroid. Useless, perhaps. But what a lesson in scientific culture—and what beauty of execution when watchmaking becomes a cosmic calendar.

Star chart and sidereal time: the wrist as observatory

When an ultramarine disc studded with stars glides beneath a domed sapphire, you understand that watchmaking can be closer to an astrolabe than a mere instrument. Sidereal time—offset by roughly 3 minutes 56 seconds per day compared with solar time—sets the pace of revolving skies, sometimes accompanied by faithfully charted constellations. These complications demand near-astronomical know-how: printing celestial domes, calculating scales, micrometric adjustments. They are the antithesis of practicality, yet the very essence of learned beauty.

Sunrise, sunset and tides: the horizon, domesticated

Indicating sunrise and sunset times for a given latitude, displaying the state of the tides—sometimes even the ocean’s phases—these complications speak to the inner explorer more than the everyday navigator. They require bespoke calculations and anchor the watch to a place, an intimate geography. You don’t use them so much as refer to them, like a poetic landmark—proof that watchmaking can also write landscapes.

Deadbeat and foudroyante seconds: the illusion of time

The deadbeat seconds, paradoxically, mimics the quartz tick-tock with high-end mechanics: the hand jumps from marker to marker. Conversely, the foudroyante seconds gallops at full speed around a small register to display fractions of a second, then drops back to zero like a repeated firework. One simplifies, the other exaggerates, and neither is strictly useful. Yet both reveal time as a game of illusions, magnified by the language of gears, constant-force mechanisms and expertly polished jumpers.

Automata and jacquemarts: an animated soul

One press of a pusher and a bird spreads its wings, a couple dances, a figure strikes a bell. Heirs to the great automaton-makers, today’s jacquemarts bring together engraving, enamelling, micromechanics and music. You’re not looking for the time; you’re watching a living tableau. This is watchmaking in its most theatrical form, where the complication becomes pure storytelling, and beauty takes its time to unfold.

Why these complications move us

Because they lay bare the intelligence of a discipline that has never been purely utilitarian. High watchmaking doesn’t optimise daily life; it elevates a gesture. We admire the anglage that catches the light, the symmetry of a dial, the cunning of a mechanism designed for a few seconds of grace. These useless complications give a reason to exist to the métiers d’art, to the transmission of workshop knowledge, to the pursuit of a “necessary uselessness” that has made the finest maisons famous.

A few maisons that cultivate necessary uselessness

• Patek Philippe: star charts and sidereal indications with disarming classicism.
• Vacheron Constantin: ambitious astronomies, sunrise/sunset displays and poetic mechanics.
• Jaeger-LeCoultre: airy tourbillons and sidereal orchestrations, in a tradition of engineer-artists.
• Jaquet Droz: automata and singing birds—emotion above all.
• De Bethune: spherical moons, flame-blued starry skies, artisanal futurism.
• Ulysse Nardin: tides, planetariums, maritime audacity that feeds the imagination.
• A. Lange & Söhne: deadbeat seconds and Saxon seriousness in the service of contemplative precision.
• Van Cleef & Arpels: “poetic complications” that turn time into a story.

The luxury of wasting time

In a world that confuses speed with progress, these complications remind us of a simple truth: the best-lived time is often the time we take to look. To watch a tourbillon breathe. To watch the Moon grow. To watch a second stop dead, then start again. They serve no purpose—except to remind us why we love watchmaking: for beauty, for culture, and for that mechanical whisper that connects us to something greater than ourselves. The useless? It’s what remains when everything has been measured—the share of soul that makes a watch something other than a tool.

By way of conclusion

Choosing a “useless” complication is collecting an idea: that the wrist can carry a piece of sky, a physicist’s trick, an artist’s wink. The complication becomes a conversation, a sign of complicity between enthusiasts. And what if a watch’s finest function were not to tell the time, but to offer minutes to contemplate?