Of all the colors a watchmaker can lay on a dial, purple carries the strangest and most exclusive history, and it is worth knowing before you look at this one. For most of antiquity, purple was almost impossible to make. The deep violet the Romans called Tyrian purple came from a tiny gland inside a particular sea snail, and it took many thousands of those snails, harvested and crushed and processed drop by drop, to dye a single garment. The result was so laborious and so scarce that it became, quite literally, the color of power: Roman law reserved the deepest purples for the emperor alone, Byzantine princes born during their father's reign were called porphyrogenitus, "born in the purple," and to wear the color at all was to announce a rank almost no one could claim. That is the lineage a purple dial quietly invokes, and it makes the choice on this Nautilus something more pointed than a pretty color. It is the most regal hue in the palette, worn on the most recognizable luxury sports watch in the world.
Patek Philippe has rendered that imperial color in lacquer, and the way it is applied is what gives the dial its life. Beneath the purple lies the Nautilus's signature relief, the horizontal ripples that have run across the model's dials since Gérald Genta designed it in 1976 to echo the surface of water, and the translucent lacquer sits over that embossed wave so that the color pools slightly deeper in the grooves and catches the light along the ridges. The effect is that the purple is never flat or uniform; it shifts as the wrist turns, darkening in the troughs and brightening on the crests, alive with the same rippling movement that has always defined the Nautilus face. It is a color you keep looking at, because it keeps changing, and the wave pattern that on a blue dial reads as cool and marine here becomes something warmer and more jewel-like, a violet sea catching light.
Around that dial, rose gold does the framing, and the pairing is deliberately warm. The bezel is set with a ring of forty-six diamonds, a little under a carat in total, encircling the purple with a band of white brilliance, and where a steel Nautilus would keep the octagonal bezel plain and severe, here it becomes a jewel setting, softening the tool-watch geometry into something dressier without losing the unmistakable shape. The rose gold of the case and the applied numerals warms the cool purple, its coppery blush answering the violet the way sunset colors answer one another, so the whole watch reads as a considered harmony rather than a loud contrast. Applied rose gold numerals at twelve and six and slim markers around the rest, all filled with luminescent coating, keep the dial legible and grounded, and the rose gold alpha hands sweep cleanly across the rippled color. A date sits neatly at three in its own rose gold frame, the single practical concession on an otherwise purely elegant face.
Sized at thirty-two millimeters and standing under seven thick, the case wears with the intimacy the ladies' Nautilus is meant to have, present enough to be recognized as a Nautilus from across a table but scaled and slimmed for a slender wrist. The famous rounded-octagon porthole shape is entirely intact, its hinged flanks and integrated bracelet unmistakable, so that even shrunk and jeweled and colored violet, the watch never stops being the icon it descends from. The rose gold bracelet flows out of the case with the seamless integration that has always been the hardest part of the design to execute, tapering along the wrist and fastening with Patek's patented fold-over clasp, and the whole thing has the density and precision that separates a real Nautilus from anything trying to look like one.
The movement is quartz, and that deserves to be understood as a choice rather than a compromise. This is a watch conceived to be worn as a jewel, put on in the morning and forgotten until evening, keeping accurate time for years on a single battery without winding or resetting or any attention at all, and for that purpose Patek's own quartz caliber is exactly right. It runs the seconds smoothly around the dial, it asks nothing of its owner, and it lets the watch be what it is meant to be: an ornament that also happens to tell time flawlessly. There is a long and slightly snobbish tendency to dismiss quartz, but for a small, precious, everyday jewel like this one, the technology serves the design's intent perfectly, and a Patek quartz movement is held to the same finishing and quality standards as everything else the house makes.
What makes the 7010 in this particular execution so appealing is the way it takes the Nautilus, a design born austere and masculine and marine, and reimagines it entirely as an object of feminine luxury without betraying a single line of the original. The shape is Genta's, the wave is Genta's, the integrated bracelet is Genta's, and yet the diamond bezel, the rose gold, and above all that imperial purple transform the watch into something the 1976 original could never have anticipated: not a sports watch dressed down for the beach, but a jewel dressed up for anything. The color does most of the work, and it does it with a quiet grandeur, because purple has always been the color that means more than beautiful. It means rare, and it means royal.
To wear it is to wear the icon in its most personal and least expected form, the shape everyone knows rendered in the one color almost no one puts on a watch, framed in warm gold and diamonds, keeping perfect time with no fuss at all. It is the Nautilus reduced to pure elegance and lifted by a color with three thousand years of imperial history behind it, and the combination is far more considered than a glance might suggest. A purple dial is not merely a fashionable flourish; it is the oldest way there is of saying that the person wearing it need answer to no one.
