Tropical Dial 25730ST Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Dual Time

The Extract of Archive on this 25730ST states that this is a blue dial. Think of the quantity of life this Dual Time has experienced on wrist to be so caramel. The 25730 and 26120 Royal Oak Dual Times have been fascinating me lately, partly for how shortly they were produced and largely for just how varied that production was. There may be no greater testament to the latter variance than this very example. It’s a normal 25730 early petite tapisserie, but mixed caps AP signature, which was quite a narrow window of production. Except that it’s not normal at all.

On a recent podcast episode of ours, my co-host Max mentioned the AP 25721ST, known as ‘The Beast’, as a guilty pleasure which often went very tropical. Those dials come from the exact same era as what you see here. There’s a whole narrow window at the very end of the petite tapisserie years, across a few references, 25860 Kasparovs, 25721 Beasts, and indeed 25730 Dual Times, where the painted or anodized navy was unstable. These navy dials, when exposed to a good bit of heat and sun, gave up the navy and their brass dial plates began to show through. You’ll find them at various shades of blue-purple, gold, or when fully god-level tropical this outright brass caramel with just little hint of navy around the handstack. Each is individual, but often they’re a truly wild patina to behold.

And that’s just the dial, but the watch itself does deserve some ink spilled on its behalf. It’s the mid-size, but a very narrow window of production. Very shortly after AP introduced their mixed capitals signature on dials, most petite tapisserie models moved toward grande tapisserie. There’s a window of production in the mid 90s where both existed together. So this is more overpowering power reserve dial, without numerals every five minutes and in tritium, but mixed caps AP. In other words, a strange beast for us AP nerds. There aren’t enough objects that get better with use in life. Watches like this are the opposite of planned obsolescence. AP should make more mistakes like this and fewer like the Marvel series.

This example sports a very caramel dial but somehow all the tritium is still together, an equally tanned tone in the dial and handset. Its subs have a super interesting radial pattern of tropicalization, which we often see. Its case is really rather sharp, remarkably so. It comes with an Extract of Archive and service box, from a well-regarded Belgian retailer.