Perfection or Beautiful Imperfection?

Has precision killed beauty?

Over the past two decades, CNC machining centres have pushed geometric consistency very far. A well-machined component comes out with crisp edges, regularly prepared bevels, and very clean surfaces. In terms of repeatability, it is an immense advance. In some cases, it is even a condition of irreproachable quality.

But this accuracy is not always enough to create presence. A component can be perfectly coherent in plan, very sound in preparation, and still leave a colder, more neutral, almost closed impression. Light passes over it, glides away, and leaves. It does not always encounter that subtle tension which suggests that a human eye still chose, reworked, and restrained.

The great maisons know this very well. Patek Philippe describes anglage as one of the most complex finishes precisely because it is not simply a matter of breaking an edge, but of guiding and polishing it in such a way as to create a play of light that emphasises the form without distorting it.¹ For its part, the Fondation Haute Horlogerie reminds us that the chamfer remains a hallmark of a superior-quality watch.²

In other words: the machine provides the foundation, sometimes at a very high level. But emotion does not automatically arise from accuracy alone.

What the hand removes, what it leaves, what it reveals

When the angleur reworks a component, they are not only working against visible defects. They are also working against a certain neutrality. They remove machining marks, of course, but they do more than that: they restore hierarchy to surfaces, breathing room to transitions, and coherence to the path of light.

In the workshop, this rarely happens through a spectacular gesture. Very often, the difference is almost invisible when static. It is in the movement of the reflection, in the firmness of a corner, in the continuity of a curve, in a micro-correction of width, that the component gains its presence. The chamfer ceases to be merely “clean.” It becomes inhabited.

One must be careful here: not all “imperfections” are beautiful, and not all human traces are signatures. A mistake remains a mistake. A weak line, a rescued junction, a width that swells through fatigue, a polish that masks soft geometry do not become noble simply because they come from a hand. By contrast, certain very fine irregularities, controlled and coherent with the whole, can carry the mark of real guidance rather than automatic conformity.

This idea also echoes what several studies in consumer behaviour suggest: handmade products are often perceived as more natural and more authentic than their machine-made equivalents, and that perception affects their value.⁵ The effect is neither universal nor magical, but it reminds us of something useful: people do not always seek the coldest regularity. They also seek signs of presence, intention, and decision.

AI, CNC: the same fight against automatic blandness

The comparison with AI-assisted writing comes quite naturally. A generated text can be clean, fluid, well structured, with no visible errors. And yet, after a few paragraphs, something grows tiring: the rhythm repeats, the sentence stays tame, the tone smells of the average. Then it must be reworked, pared back, a cadence that is too smooth must be broken, a rare word, a dissonance, a risk must be introduced — in short: a voice must be allowed back in.

At the bench, the logic is similar. CNC is indispensable. It provides a foundation, a coherence, and an efficiency that it would be absurd to deny. But if everything stops at that coherence, the result can become too neutral, too interchangeable, too “perfect” in the wrong sense of the word. So the angleur does not work against the machine as though fighting a rearguard battle. They work with it, and then beyond it.

This intuition also resonates with what is emerging in other creative fields: when works are presented as co-created with AI, they may be perceived as more novel, but also as less authentic, especially when the human intervention seems too weak or too erased.⁶ Watchmaking is not contemporary art, of course. But the underlying question is similar: do we want performance of execution alone, or are we still looking for the trace of a mind at work?

High watchmaking has long since given its answer: true luxury is not perfect conformity alone. It is the combination of rigour and presence.

Anglage as a manifesto for a humanised luxury

As robotics, ultra-fine machining, automatic reworking strategies, and assisted finishing continue to advance, the value of the hand will not mechanically disappear. Its status will change. It will become less of a brute necessity and more of a workshop civilisation choice: the choice to commit time, energy, attention, and a measure of trained subjectivity.

A. Lange & Söhne expresses this very well when it insists that certain inward angles and certain chamfers remain entirely executed by hand, because they belong to a level of finishing that the maison still associates with a very high artisanal presence.³ This is not merely a matter of nostalgia or image. It is a way of asserting that everything technically possible does not exhaust what is humanly desirable.

For Art de l’Anglage, transmitting this practice therefore means preparing the future, not preserving a museum. It means teaching patience, respect for light, a way of feeling the material and judging a level. In Les Brenets, the student does not merely learn how to make things shine. They learn to understand what they leave, what they remove, what they hold, and what they betray.

In the end, the real question may not be “perfection or beautiful imperfection?”. The real question would rather be: what still makes us feel that a human being was there, attentive, when the component reached its final form?

When the hand no longer merely corrects, but signs

A very true chamfer does not only say that a component is well finished. It says something deeper: that between material, geometry, light, and time, a judgement was held. The machine can go very far. It will go even further. But what it does not replace by itself is that fine layer of decision which transforms technical coherence into sensible presence.

In high watchmaking, a highly accomplished anglage is therefore neither a superstition of the past nor a decorative addition meant to reassure the client. It is a place where one can still read, very concretely, the quality of a workshop standard — and sometimes the discreet signature of a hand that knew not to do too much.