Welcome to our series highlighting the exceptional watches that are available through Perpetual, Phillips’ boutique service offering immediate access to the world’s rarest and most desirable timepieces. You can view all currently available watches by visiting our London headquarters at 30 Berkeley Square, or by visiting Perpetual online.
– By Logan Baker
I’ll begin this edition of Perpetual Picks with potentially a surprising statement – mechanical timekeeping is redundant technology in the 21st century. That doesn’t make participating in the watch-collecting hobby any less captivating of a pursuit, less culturally or intellectually relevant, or emotionally rewarding.
Today’s watch collectors have been set free from the utilitarian shackles that dominated a significant majority of mid-century tool and sport watches. After all, if you don’t need your watch to tell time, it better make you smile when you look down at it. And as the market for both luxury-grade sport watches and experimental watchmaking has rapidly expanded in recent years, we've seen certain watchmakers embrace the impractical and absurd in their new sport watches.
Most people won’t take their dive watches more than a few meters below sea level, so why did Rolex feel the need to recently release the titanium Deepsea Challenge that can function just as well 11,000 meters deep as it can on dry land? They did it because they could – and because watch collectors, and humans more generally, enjoy the extreme.
Extremes can take shape in watchaking in many different ways, such as water resistance, shockproofness, or high operating frequencies, but one dive watch that recently landed at Phillips PERPETUAL takes things to a new level – it can light up.
And I don't mean that as a reference to the use of glow-in-the-dark material like Super-LumiNova. The De Bethune DB28GS "Grand Bleu" lights up at the touch of a button, with zero batteries required. Yeah.
Pretty cool, huh? Here's what you need to know about the De Bethune DB28GS "Grand Bleu."
De Bethune Created The Perfect Watch For Night Diving
No one expected De Bethune to release a dive watch, but that’s exactly what they did in 2019 with the DB28GS Grand Bleu.
The new diver was a sequel to the original DB28GS, De Bethune’s first official “sport watch,” and represented their debut in the genre after close to two decades of existence, and perhaps its most interesting attribute was the use of a unique self-illuminating mechanical dynamo system that lights up the watch’s interior in six second bursts when activated.
Using zero electronics or batteries, a pusher flush on the caseband at six o’clock activates a small gear train that’s driven by the two mainspring barrels. This gear train, by means of a miniature dynamo, provides the energy needed to emit a blue-white light out of the four cardinal spots inside the black 60-minute bezel insert.
De Bethune worked with James Thompson of Black Badger Advanced Composites, an expert in all things lume, to create a unique and proprietary photoluminescent material named Blue Moon that improves the legibility of the hands, hour markers, and bezel while remaining true to the brand’s trademark blue hue.
As De Bethune’s first dive watch, the DB28GS was also the first De Bethune watch outfitted with a rotating unidirectional bezel. While the bezel rotates like you’d expect it to, the numbers for elapsed timekeeping are actually applied to the sapphire crystal, a decision made to keep the watch thin. At 44mm × 12.8mm, the watch is unexpectedly thin for a dive watch, and the use of the brand’s signature “floating lugs” ensures it wears easily and like no other watch out there. The multi-piece case made from grade-5 titanium with black zirconium inserts also helps keep things light and breezy on the wrist.
The DB28GS features De Bethune’s 27th in-house produced movement, offering up a five-day power reserve and a unique energy conservation system that blocks the watch’s illuminating ability when the running autonomy has dropped below 24 hours of juice (indicated by a subtle display between nine and 10 o’clock). I also always love De Bethune’s in-house balance wheel, crafted from a blend of titanium and white gold.
Despite the complexity of the movement and the avant-garde nature of the aesthetics, the De Bethune DB28GS Grand Bleu is tested with up to 105 meters of water resistance. Sure, that’s no Deepsea Challenge, but does any Rolex offer self-illumination? I didn’t think so.
A 2020 De Bethune DB28GS Grand Bleu with its original box, certificate, product literature, and additional strap and clasps is available for immediate purchase from Phillips PERPETUAL, for £110,000.
About Phillips PERPETUAL
Phillips PERPETUAL offers a boutique experience to clients for both the sale and purchase of fine and rare watches, in London’s Berkeley Square and the Gstaad Palace, in Switzerland.
About Logan Baker
Logan has spent the past decade reporting on every aspect of the watch business. He joined Phillips in Association with Bacs & Russo at the start of 2023 as the department's Senior Editorial Manager. He splits his time between New York and Geneva.
Visit Phillips PERPETUAL /
30 Berkeley Square, London, United Kingdom, W1J 6EX (map)
Monday through Friday, 10:00 AM – 17:30 PM
Contact & Consignment Enquiries /
00 44 207 901 7916
perpetual@phillips.com
@phillipsperpetual
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