Every spring, Tiffany & Co. releases a new edition of its Blue Book high jewellery collection, and every spring the question is the same: how far can the house push its craft before a watch becomes a piece of art? With the Paradise Bird Parrot, unveiled as part of Blue Book 2026: Hidden Garden, the answer involves 167 cumulative hours of handwork, a 2.5-carat floating chrysoprase, and a tiny gem-set parrot that looks very much at home on your wrist.
The watch traces its lineage to Jean Schlumberger, the French designer who joined Tiffany in 1956 and spent three decades reimagining the natural world through jewellery. His birds, parrots, peacocks, phoenixes, hummingbirds, remain among the most collected pieces in the house’s archive. The Paradise Bird Parrot draws most directly from his 1962 Oiseau de Paradis clip, updating its vivid creature for a 36mm snow-set white gold case.
The dial is where the hours accumulate. Four layers of opaque blue enamel form the base; on top, three coats of hand-painted foliage build out the scene. That process alone runs to over 80 hours of precision work. Floating above the painted surface, the cabochon chrysoprase sits over a dial aperture aligned with a loupe on the caseback, a detail that floods the stone with light and deepens its colour to something closer to tropical glass.
The parrot itself, which is an 18k white gold, with an onyx beak, pink sapphire eyes, and a turquoise body set with 70 stones, takes 32 hours to complete. Its crest and feathers are hand-painted in minute detail. The case, entirely snow-set with 425 round brilliant diamonds, accounts for another 55 hours. On the caseback, a sunburst pattern drawn from Schlumberger’s Arrows brooch is scattered with diamonds; a push button at its centre sets the time. The edition is limited to only 10 pieces.
The movement is Swiss quartz and the strap is navy alligator. It is, by any measure, a watch that rewards looking at closely, and the loupe built into the back suggests Tiffany knows exactly that.
