The Golden Ellipse was introduced in 1968 with a yellow gold case and a cobalt blue dial, and it was immediately recognized as something exceptional: a shaped watch whose proportions derived not from arbitrary aesthetics but from the mathematical principle of the golden ratio — the relationship of 1 to approximately 1.618 that appears throughout nature, architecture, and classical art as the proportion most naturally perceived by the human eye as balanced and harmonious. The Golden Ellipse's case dimensions, with the shorter axis to the longer axis in this ratio, produce an oval that cannot be improved upon in the same sense that a right angle cannot be improved upon — the proportion is derived from a principle rather than from a preference, and it registers in perception as inherently right rather than as a designer's choice. The reference 5738G-001, introduced at Watches & Wonders 2026 in white gold with a sunburst olive green dial and a matching shiny olive green calfskin strap with contrasting cream stitching, brings to the large-format Golden Ellipse a dial color whose specific qualities — earthy warmth, complex tonal behavior, the particular character of green at the yellow-green end of the spectrum — interact with the case's white gold and the sunburst finish in ways that make this among the most visually dynamic expressions the 5738 has yet offered.
Olive green is a color of unusual tonal complexity, and that complexity is both its distinguishing quality and the reason it interacts so productively with the sunburst finish. Where a pure green occupies a narrow chromatic position — definitively cool, unambiguously bright — olive green carries components of yellow, brown, and gray alongside its green base, producing a color whose tonal character shifts depending on the light conditions and the observation angle. In warm light, the yellow component of the olive green is amplified and the color reads as almost golden; in cool light, the gray component becomes dominant and the color reads as a deep, slightly muted green with no warmth; in neutral light, the brown component gives the color its characteristic earthy quality, simultaneously warm and deep. Patek Philippe's description of the 5738G-001's dial color as offering "fascinating depth and shimmering effects" is precise: the olive green's tonal complexity makes the sunburst finish's directional light behavior more varied and more visually interesting than a simpler color would produce, each different viewing angle and light condition returning a different tonal register from the same dial surface.
The sunburst finish on the olive green dial radiates from the center outward, the centrifugal brushing grooves directing light along their length and creating the characteristic deepening from center toward perimeter that the sunburst produces on any dial. On olive green at this level of tonal complexity, the sunburst's effect is to add another dimension of variation: the center, brightest from the brushing return, reads as the warmest and most yellow-influenced expression of the olive; the perimeter, where the brushing's returned light is most diffused, reads as the deepest and most gray-influenced. The dial at 34.5 by 39.5 millimeters has enough surface area to make this radial variation perceptible across the dial's full extent, the color's range from warm olive center to cooler, deeper olive perimeter covering a span of tonal expression that at smaller scales would be compressed and at larger scales might become diffuse. The Golden Ellipse's specific dimensions are the right dimensions for this effect.
The case architecture is the large-format Golden Ellipse at its established specification: white gold, entirely polished, the golden-ratio oval measuring 34.5 by 39.5 millimeters — dimensions that Patek Philippe has held consistent across the 5738 family as the embodiment of the proportion principle that defines the collection. At 5.9 millimeters in height, the 5738G-001 is the thinnest watch in the current Golden Ellipse collection — a distinction that reflects the Calibre 240's architectural achievements and that positions the watch as an object of particular physical elegance on the wrist. A 5.9-millimeter-high watch at 34.5 by 39.5 millimeters is nearly as flat as a sheet of metal of these dimensions would suggest, and this flatness — the watch disappearing under a cuff, lying against the wrist without the profile of conventional watch construction — is the Golden Ellipse's most purely architectural quality. The solid case back is standard for the 5738 reference, the movement's architecture maintained as an internal quality rather than displayed as a caseback aesthetic.
The white gold applied baton-style hour markers — slim, rectangular, polished — stand against the olive green ground with the specific quality of cool metal against an earthy-warm color: the markers appear almost cooler against the olive green than they would against a neutral gray or silver ground, the olive's warmth providing a temperature contrast that makes the white gold's own cool grey-white more apparent. The white gold cheveu-style hands — the "hair" hands named for their extreme slenderness, tapering to near-invisible points at their tips — are among watchmaking's most refined hand forms, their delicacy calibrated to the Golden Ellipse's proportions and to the philosophy of a watch that eliminates everything unnecessary. On the olive green dial, these gossamer hands sweep the color's changing tonal field with the lightness of something placed rather than attached. The "Patek Philippe / Geneve" text appears in white in the upper dial register, its placement beneath the twelve o'clock marker consistent with the collection's long-established composition.
The Calibre 240 is the Golden Ellipse's essential technical underpinning — the movement whose 2.53-millimeter height makes the 5.9-millimeter case possible. The off-center 22-karat gold mini-rotor, integrated at bridge level rather than positioned above the top bridge, provides bidirectional automatic winding while contributing minimally to the movement's total height. The Gyromax balance wheel and Spiromax silicon hairspring provide rate stability and magnetic resistance; 27 jewels reduce friction across the gear train; 152 parts constitute the complete calibre. Power reserve is a minimum of 48 hours. The movement beats at 21,600 vibrations per hour — a lower frequency than many contemporary automatic movements, appropriate to the movement's thin architecture and consistent with the Golden Ellipse's identity as a dress watch rather than a sports instrument.
The shiny olive green calfskin strap with contrasting cream stitching is, like the 7200/50G-001's matching sand beige strap and the 7129J-001's matching carmine red strap, a tone-on-tone pairing that makes the strap a visual continuation of the dial rather than a separate compositional element. The cream stitching provides the one point of contrast within the otherwise unified olive green composition — picking up, very loosely, the yellow-warm component of the olive green's own tonal range and providing a note of warmth that prevents the tone-on-tone pairing from reading as entirely flat. The white gold prong buckle completes the deployment with material consistency.
The 5738G-001 is introduced alongside the companion medium-size reference 3738/100G-014 — the return of the 31.1 by 39.5-millimeter Golden Ellipse format that had been absent from the regular collection — and Patek Philippe has noted that the two may be worn as a complementary pair. But the 5738G-001 makes its own argument independently of this pairing context. The large-format Golden Ellipse in white gold with an olive green sunburst dial is the most chromatic expression of the 5738 in white gold to date — a color that is neither the cool formality of the blue dial nor the neutral warmth of a silver opaline, but a color of genuine earthy complexity that changes character with the light, that rewards sustained attention across a full day of wearing, and that positions one of watchmaking's most formally resolved case designs within a chromatic register it has not previously occupied. For the collector who has followed the Golden Ellipse and wanted the 5738G in white gold in a color that asks something of the wearer's attention, the olive green is that color.
