Short answer: there is no A. Lange & Söhne model called the "Lange 2," and no replica of a Lange perpetual calendar has a working perpetual calendar. If a listing promises one, the listing is fiction. What ships under that label is a case shaped like the Lange 1 Perpetual Calendar or the Lange 1 Moon Phase, holding a generic Chinese automatic, with calendar subdials that are printed, plated, or driven by a plain date wheel.

Where the "Lange 2" name comes from

Lange's catalog runs the Lange 1, the Lange 1 Perpetual Calendar, the Lange 1 Moon Phase, the Saxonia, the Odysseus, and a handful of others. No Lange 2. The label is grey-market shorthand that grew out of the Lange 1's asymmetric dial, where the outsize date and the off-center main dial read as "two dials" to someone flipping through factory photos. Sellers welded it onto perpetual calendar listings because it sounds like an upgrade.

So when you search the term, you are really shopping for one of two things: a Lange 1 Perpetual Calendar copy, which is just under 42 mm and has a moon phase and a retrograde day-of-week, or a Lange 1 Moon Phase copy at roughly 38.5 mm. Know which one the photos show before you judge anything else. A listing that mixes the two is a listing assembled from stolen images.

Why the perpetual part never survives

A genuine perpetual calendar tracks leap years and will not need a correction until 2100. That mechanism is a stack of cams, levers, and a program wheel, hand-finished, and it is one of the most expensive things a watchmaker can build. Nobody has cloned it at replica scale. The economics do not work. Tooling a Lange-grade perpetual movement to sell at four figures would cost more than the watches would return.

What you get instead is a calendar module that handles a 31-day month at best, or purely decorative subdials that never move because they are glued to a plate. I have seen moon phases that were a printed disc on the dial side with no aperture mechanism behind them. They look fine in a photo and look dead in your hand.

What I check first on the bench

• Outsize date: Lange uses two separate discs with a crossbar. Replicas often print both digits on one disc, or leave a visible gap that no genuine watch has.
• Subdial printing: Look at the day-of-week arc and the moon phase aperture under a loupe. Fuzzy edges and dot-matrix texture are the giveaway.
• Movement finish: A real Lange has a hand-engraved balance cock and screwed gold chatons. Copies have laser etching and painted blue screws. The engraving on a copy repeats identically from watch to watch.
• Case weight: Genuine pieces are gold. A plated steel case feels hollow and light in a way you notice immediately when you pick it up.
• Dial text: The "Glashütte i/SA" signature and the country-of-origin line should be crisp and correctly spaced. Crooked lettering shows up on almost every budget example.

Price tiers, honestly

Below roughly $150 you get a plated case, a mineral crystal that scratches in weeks, and a movement that will drift. Between $250 and $500 the case finishing improves, sapphire shows up, and the movement gets decoration that looks acceptable from arm's length. Above $600 the seller is charging for a story, not for a better watch, because no Lange movement clone exists to justify the jump.

Red flags worth walking away from

"Fully functional perpetual calendar" on a Lange copy is an outright lie. So is "Swiss made" on a watch in this family, and so are stock photos with three different strap colors and the same serial number. Watch for listings that use the genuine watch's press images, then ship something a millimeter off in case size. Ask for a timestamped photo of the actual piece on a scale. Sellers with nothing to hide send one.

The legal side, briefly

In the United States, importing and selling counterfeit goods carrying a registered trademark is illegal, and Customs seizes shipments routinely. Buying one for yourself sits in a grey zone that varies by state. Reselling one, or carrying it through customs, does not. That is worth knowing before you spend anything.

The short version: enjoy these for what they are, a costume of a watch you like. Do not pay for a complication that is not there, and do not expect a $400 object to behave like a six-figure one.