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  • Tudor Surprises With Inter Miami CF Themed Pink Black Bay Chrono; Norqain Gives Pastel Dials To Freedom 60 Chrono; The New Rado Could Become A Mood Watch; And New From Sphaera And Chronoswiss

Tudor Surprises With Inter Miami CF Themed Pink Black Bay Chrono; Norqain Gives Pastel Dials To Freedom 60 Chrono; The New Rado Could Become A Mood Watch; And New From Sphaera And Chronoswiss

Pink dials are really becoming more popular, what are your thoughts on them?

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It's About Time
March 29, 2024

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. Seeing what Zenith, Aquastar and now Tudor have done, can we assume that pink will be the color of the year? I don’t mind it at all! Also, what are your thoughts on Norqain? And another thing - I’m taking Monday off, a lot of Easter family duties. I hope you get some rest from my daily emails!

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In this issue:

  • Tudor Surprises With A Pink Black Bay Chrono In Partnership With Inter Miami CF

  • Norqain Brings Three New Pastel Colors To Their Retro Designed Freedom 60 Chrono

  • The New Rado Collaboration With Kunihiko Special Is The Closest We Have Come To A Mood Watch Yet

  • Sphaera Follows Up The Desk Diver Watch With The Epoch Sport and Classic

  • Chronoswiss Has A New Take On The Horizontal Regulator Layout With The Strike Two Golden Gear And H2O

Today’s reading time: 10 minutes and 23 seconds

👂What’s new

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I was genuinely surprised to see that the Tudor partnership with David Beckham has only been going on since 2017. This link is so ubiquitous that it seems that the two have been working together for decades. But this, of course, can’t be true as we know Beckham to be a prolific watch collector and have seen him wearing some pretty significant watches, which isn’t really possible in the era of him wearing Tudors. His link with the Swiss brand has also spread to his other business ventures, as Tudor has announced earlier in the week that they have become the official partner of Inter Miami CF, owned by Beckam and the Mas billionaire brothers. Just a few days after that announcement, Tudor surprised everyone with the new Tudor Black Bay Chrono Pink featuring the team’s colours on the dial.

Technically, this is not a brand new watch, as this exact dial shade was used for a one-off watch intended for another Tudor ambassador, Jay Chou, a Taiwanese singer and musician. Regardless of the connection to Choud or Inter Miami, this is the first time that the Tudor Black Bay Chrono comes with a pink dial and I’m sure that it will bring a lot of attention to the sometimes forgotten collection from Tudor.

On the outside, this is the same Tudor Black Bay Chrono that comes in a number of dial colors and case materials. This one comes in stainless steel and measures 41mm wide and 14.4mm thick, with a 49.9mm lug-to-lug. Yeah, it’s a big boy. Water resistance is 200 meters, which is not that common for chronographs. To get that water resistance, Tudor made the caseback and crown screw down, which is not much of an issue. What is more of an issue is that the pushers are also screw down, which is not ideal.

Even the dial is pretty much the same, other than the color. Speaking of the color, it’s an almost pastel shade of pink. Like the other watches in the collection, it’s a panda style dial, with black subdials and a bi-compax layout, with a date window at 6 o’clock. Sorrounding the dial and sapphire crystal is a black tachymeter bezel.

While Tudor makes their own three hand movements in the Kenissi factory, for the chronographs they still use the Breitling-B01-chronograph-caliber-based MT5813 movement. It doesn’t have master chronometer certification, but it does beat at 28,800vph, have a 70 hour power reserve and it’s equipped with a silicon balance spring and a 45 minutes totalizer instead of a 30-minute scale. But an even more important change is the bracelet the watch comes on - this is the first time that the Black Bay Chrono gets a five-row Jubilee-style bracelet and T-fit clasp. The internet is already ablaze in anticipation for the new bracelet to trickle down to the rest of the Chrono lineup.

The new Tudor Black Bay Chrono Pink is likely a limited edition, as Tudor says that “only a small number of examples will be produced”, but they don’t specify how many. Price is €5,670, the same as the regular BB Chrono. See more on the Tudor website.

2/

The rise of Norqain, since its inception in 2018, has been nothing short of impressive. While I heavily dislike their watches, there’s no denying that in six short years the team has managed to produce a whole slew of model lines and take the spot that Breitling held a few years ago, both in terms of positioning as an adventure style watch, and it’s slightly over-the-top design. That’s not to say that Breitling has lost anything - in fact, they only got much, much, better since 2018 - but the fact is that Norqain is moving their way up there. While they are mostly known for their adventure watches from the Independence and Adventure lines, Norqain also has the retro-inspired Freedom collection. And now they are updating the 40mm version of the Freedom 60 Chrono models, a 60s-style chrono, with three new dials, all in various pastel shades.

The Freedom 60 Chrono first came out as a 43mm wide case, followed by a 40mm a year or two later, and this is the smaller of the two cases. Made out of stainless steel, it measures 40mm wide, 14.9mm thick and has a 49.2mm lug-to-lug measurement. The finish is polished, with brushed sides and there’s a domed sapphire crystal on top. On the right side are equally as vintage looking pump-style pushers and you get 100 meters of water resistance.

There are three new colors for the dial, all supposedly inspired by summering in Tuscany. The colors are Sky Blue, Pistachio and Peach, which will be a limited edition. All three have a sunray-brushed finish and a black tachymetre scale on the periphery. The watch has a tri-compax layout with snailed black subdials on the Peach and Pistachio and blue on the Sky blue. A date window can be found at the horrible 4:30 position, but at least the date disc is color matched to the dial so they’re not as noticable. The indices are applied and rhodium plated, just like the hands. The Peach and Pistachio dial have Old Radium Super-LumiNova on their indices and hands, while the Sky Blue dial has white Super-LumiNova.

Inside all three watches is the calibre N19, which is essentially a Sellita SW510a with a different rotor. It’s a cam-type integrated chronograph that beats at 28,800bph and has a 62 hour power reserve. There are three strap options - a stainless steel bracelet, a black Perlon rubber strap, and a Nortide linen strap in either grey or ivory.

The Peach Freedom 60 Chrono is limited to 300 pieces and retails for CHF 4,250 on the steel bracelet, CHF 4,150 on the black rubber strap and CHF 3,990 on the Nortide strap. The Pistachio and Sky Blue are slightly cheaper at CHF 4,150 on steel, CHF 4,050 on rubber and CHF 3,890 on the Nortide. See more on the Norqain website.

 3/

Kunihiko Morinaga is an avant-garde fashion designer best known for his innovative designs that often use previously unseen materials that do things other materials can’t do, like change color when exposed to UV light. Being on the cutting edge of materials, it makes sense that Morinaga has partnered with Rado in 2017 for a limited edition watch, seeing as how Rado is known for their advancements in materials. Now they’re back at it again with the Rado True Square x Kunihiko Morinaga Special Edition, a watch that changes color almost like a mood ring. And I know that everybody would love to wear a mood watch.

The Rado True Square x Kunihiko Special Edition is still a Rado True Square, meaning that it comes in a polished black monobloc high-tech ceramic case that measures 38mm wide, 9.7mm thick and has a 44.2mm lug-to-lug measurement. The crown is made out of the same ceramic, out back is a black PVD sandblasted titanium case back and on top is a sapphire crystal.

The dial is where things get weird. Instead of a traditional dial, this Rado gets a transparent piece of glass that has a photochromic treatment, allowing it to change color according to available light. In direct sunlight and during the day, the dial will be almost opaque and turn a dark grey color. At night and without UV light, the dial turns transparent and shows the internals of the watch. Is it necessary? Absolutely not. Is it cool? Perhaps! The hour and minute hands are rhodium-colored and filled with Super-LumiNova. The only other marking on the dial is the Rado name at 12 o’clock and a very discreet Swiss made at 6.

And when the dial turns transparent, you can see that it’s powered by the Rado R734 automatic movement which is based on the ETA caliber C07.611, better known as the Powermatic 80. And being the .611 means that it doesn’t have the plastic components that some Powermatic 80 movements come with. You do, however, get a Nivachron hairspring, a beat rate of 3Hz and an 80 hour power reserve. The watch comes on a polished black ceramic bracelet with a titanium three-fold clasp.

The Rado True Square x Kunihiko Morinaga Special Edition doesn’t seem to be limited in number, but don’t expect it to stick around forever. Price is set at $2,700. See more on the Rado website.

4/

It’s a great thing to have a sense a humor about what you do. Especially in watches, where people can take themselves way too seriously. The Austrian brand Sphaera seems to agree with me, as their first watch was named the Desk Diver. In a world where most diving watches, particularly those which can go deeper than 500 meters, spend their days strapped to wrists sitting at desks, Sphaera put out a hard-core looking diver and acknowledged that it will not see much depth. And I applaud them for it. It’s even greater to see that the follow up to the Desk Diver is not a dud, which can happen with microbrand sophomore efforts. These are the two new Sphaera Epoch watches.

Housed in a very similar case as the Desk Diver, the Epoch gets a bead-blasted stainless steel case with a brushed bezel that’s attached with prominent and visible screws. The case measures 40.5mm wide and 12mm thick, with a sapphire crystal on top. While the Desk Diver was rated to 100 meters of water resistance, the new Epoch can go down to 200 meters.

There are two models of the Epoch, the Sport Monochrome and the Classic Rusty. The Sport gets a black sandwich dial and white lume. The 3, 6, 9 and 12 numerals are heavily stylised, with prominent minute markings between them. The Classic keeps the same shape, but gets a completely different look with a textured grey dial, brushed brass hour and seconds hands and dark grey ‘rusted’ screws in its case. I’m not a fan of fauxtina and artificial aging, but for some reason it works for me here.

Inside both is the STP 1-21 automatic movement that’s starting to show up more and more in microbrands as an alternative to the Sellita SW200-1. It beats at 4Hz and has a 40 hour power reserve. The Monochrome Sport comes on a Hirsch hybrid strap which is rubber on the inside and has a recycled PET ocean sailcloth top, while the Classic comes on a brown handmade vintage waxed leather strap.

The new Sphaera Epoch watches are on sale right now and I see only one downside to them - price. They are quite aggressively priced at €1.890, but for that you get quite a unique look. See more on the Sphaera website.

5/

There are some design choices that a brand makes that instantly make your brain associate it with the watch. And wile other brands use onion crowns, whenever I see one I think that it’s on a Chronoswiss. But equally as important for the brand has been the regulator display, a type of showing time that gives each of the hands - hour, minute and second - their own space on the dial and their own axis to spin on. And while most regulators are vertically aligned, since the 1990s Chronoswiss has been allighing them horizontally. Now, they’re giving this layout a new look with the new Strike Two Golden Gear And Strike Two H2O which will be shown off at Watches and Wonders.

The Strike Two comes in a not-so-small 40mm wide and 12.7mm thick case, but then again, how could it be small when it’s made out a whopping 17 pieces. Despite this complexity, it looks quite elegant with a fluted and polished bezel on top, polished case and a blasted caseback and sides of the lugs. On the side is the familiar onion crown, now a bit less circular and a deep groove cut into the middle. The lugs are very prominent next to the fully circular case and feature screwed strap links.

The two model names mainly refer to two colorways. The Golden Gear gets a grey vertically brushed dial with a black minute ring on the periphery with white dot markings. At 9 o’clock is a gold-coloured running seconds subdial, in the center is the minute hand and at 3 o’clock is a gold subdial with Roman numerals keeping track of the hours. At the center of the hour subdial is a slight opening to see the movement. All the hands are feuille-shaped, with the minute and hour hands getting lumed. At 11 o’clock is a golden plaque with the Chronoswiss logo and limited edition number. Perhaps a bit much, but sure, why not! The H2O keeps the same layout, but with a bright blue dial base that has a texture to it. All the details that are gold on the Golden Gear are stainless steel on the H2O.

Inside is the calibre C.6000, which has been developed in collaboration with La Joux-Perret. It beats at 28,800bph and has a 55 hour power reserve. The decorations are truly next level - a ruthenium-coated finish, radial Côtes de Genève, and engravings all over the place. Both watches come on a calfskin leather strap with alligator embossing and an option of a rubber strap.

The Strike Two Golden Gear and Strike Two H2O models are both limited to 100 pieces each and look like pieces of haute horology. That’s why the price, while not low, might seem quite reasonable - CHF 9,800. See more on the Chronoswiss website.

🫳On hand

Our selection of the best reviews we stumble upon

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⚙️Real Time Reviews

A new segment in which we feature reviews from real users reviewing their personal watches

I chose this watch more than a decade ago. Being a woman I didn't like the watches that were branded for women and I was looking for a bigger model and most importantly, a watch that wasn't on every woman's wrist. I love the timeless design, the size, the character of this piece, that suits me as a wearer.

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A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

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One video you have to watch today

Some manufacturers crush old concepts and never let one-off prototypes see the light of day – but not Porsche. No, instead the German sports car company keeps them together in a priceless warehouse of wonders. Top Gear magazine went for a visit and it’s much better than you could even imagine.

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