The case is made of 316L stainless steel and then has 18K rose gold coating plated, the gold coating is thick, which is almost 5 mils. You must concern whether the rose gold coating will fade or not, I must say yes, even gold coating on genuine watches will fade, but on the replica, it will keep its gold tone after two years of wearing, that’s enough for us. The case has a very big diameter, which is 46mm, even though the case is brushed very well, but check its case edge, it does not feel as smooth as replicas made by ZF. The back is see-through crystal, which uses sapphire like the crystal on the front.The dial is in blue color, looks very charming. Amazong all IWC Le Petit Prince models, the one with blue dial is the most popular. Like the case, hour markers and hands all feature rose gold edge. Both subdials have refined circles, the small second hand is runniong on subdial at 9 o’clock. The subdial at 3 is an indicator that is displaying the remaining power reserve. It is marked with 7 DAYS, but the replica has 3-day power reserve. At 12 o’clock, there is a fan-shaped indicator that features three small windows, which displays month, date and week separately. The Annual Calendar function just works the same way as genuine watch. To get a better readability, the replica not only has big hour markers, it also has genuine Swiss lume material applied on markers and hands.
Today there is quite a high premium on original vintage pieces simply because they’re extremely rare and becoming increasingly harder to find. Decades ago, when people bought luxury watches like Rolex for example, it was perfectly normal for them to get the watch serviced, polished, or have parts replaced if you scratched or dented them up. The problem is that while they were done by the company with authentic later-era parts, they still weren’t original parts or features of the watch. Since this was such a common practice, today it’s really special – and highly valuable – if a vintage watch is totally original.When posed with the question of which watch to buy and when, every industry “expert” probably begins their answer with some variation of the same caveat: Buy for love, not for money. Watch collecting is a wild and unpredictable hobby. Auction prices for classic models have been known to hit eight figures (and then some), but most of the Rolex watches out there depreciate the moment you strap them on your wrist.I have a young friend who is ready to buy his first luxury watch. He’s been thinking about it for weeks (good boy), but every few days he calls me (bad boy) and labors the same point: He wants a watch that is an investment (even worse boy). There exists in modern watch collecting a problem: collectibility is now treated as a selling point. But the problem with everybody and their dogs knowing that something is collectible is that everybody and their dogs are quite likely to collect it.The most expensive wristwatch ever sold was the Rolex Daytona worn by Paul Newman himself. It fetched $17. million at a 2017 auction. That’s a pretty good price for a watch that was so unpopular when it was initially launched that it lingered on dealers’ shelves with relatively few actually making their way onto customers’ wrists. One of those wrists happened to be Paul Newman, who had reputedly been bought the watch by his wife, Joanne Woodward. And it isn’t that she made a sound investment, but rather her purchase created an investment piece by her gifting it to her stratospherically famous husband.
