Tubogas or Perlée

Van Cleef & Arpels had been edging its jewels with tiny gold beads since the 1920s before it gave them a line of their own, Perlée, in 2008. The beads run in single or multiple rows and are polished on the back as well as the front. Tubogas sits at the other end of the decorative scale: Bulgari's 1941 coil has no ornament beyond its own winding. Each turns one repeated unit into a bracelet, a sphere in Paris, a ridge of wound gold in Rome.