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# IAT REVIEW: The Circula Facet 38 And Facet 41 And Who Really Decides How Big Our Watches Are
- URL: https://www.itsabouttime.email/iat-review-the-circula-facet-38-and-facet-41-and-who-really-decides-how-big-our-watches-are/
- Published: 2026-10-30T15:45:05.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-30T16:22:58.000Z
- Description: Online, everyone wants smaller watches, but in stores people buy bigger ones. Circula’s two Facets show why both sizes deserve to exist.
- Author: Vuk Radic
- Tags: Review

On October 13th 2020, Apple announced the iPhone 12 mini. For a certain kind of person on the internet, this was the best news of the year, and 2020 did not have a lot of good news. The mini had a 5.4-inch screen and the same chip as the full-size iPhone 12\. It fit in your palm. You could type on it with one thumb. People had been asking Apple for exactly this phone for years. Every September, when the new iPhones came out, the comment sections on tech sites filled up with the same complaint. Phones are too big. Nobody can use them with one hand. Why won't Apple make a small phone for those of us who still want one?

Then Apple made one, and hardly anybody bought it. Counterpoint Research found that the mini accounted for 5% of iPhone sales in the US in the first half of January 2021\. Consumer Intelligence Research Partners put it at 6% for the period after launch. Nikkei reported that Apple cut planned production of the mini for the first half of 2021\. There was one more attempt, the iPhone 13 mini in 2021, and then Apple gave up. The iPhone 14 lineup in 2022 had no mini at all. In its place was the iPhone 14 Plus, with a 6.7-inch screen.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/15/981552fd-1b67-4d3c-8ad7-fc38a52bf9fb/content/images/2026/10/circula_2.jpg)

You can make a few fair excuses for the mini. The battery was small. Plenty of business buyers went for the cheaper iPhone 11 instead. But the lesson Apple took from the whole thing was pretty simple. The people who wanted a small phone were real and they were loud, especially in media and public spaces online, but there weren't many of them. Most of the people who actually walk into a store and pay for a phone wanted a bigger screen.

The funny thing is that Apple had been on the other side of this argument ten years earlier. In July 2010, at the press conference about the iPhone 4 antenna problems, Steve Jobs dismissed the idea of a much bigger phone by saying "no one's going to buy that." Four years later, Apple released the iPhone 6 Plus with a 5.5-inch screen. People bought it. They have bought every large iPhone since. The small phone crowd never went away, and every now and then you'll still see someone online demanding that Apple bring back the mini. I understand them completely. I just don't think Apple will listen to them again.

I've been thinking about the iPhone mini a lot over the past few weeks, because I had two watches on my desk that tell almost a somewhat similar story. Both are the Circula Facet. Both have the petrol dial, the integrated steel bracelet and the same La Joux-Perret movement. One measures 38mm wide, the other 41mm. And it's the 38mm variant that came first, not the other way around as you might expect.

### The question Circula kept getting

When Circula launched the Facet at the end of 2024, it came in one size, and that size was 38mm. I was very happy about that. When I wrote about the launch, I called it a very grown up and serious watch, and I meant it as a compliment. A 38mm integrated-bracelet sports watch with a slim case is exactly what a big part of the enthusiast community has been asking for. No, really, if you don't believe me, just look at the comments under any 42mm sports watch. The number one complaint will be, exclusively, "why is it so big? I would buy it in a heartbeat if it was smaller".

For a while, like so many people who participate in watch culture online, believed that this was the major push for the industry: make our watches smaller. But then Cornelius, the owner Circula told me something I didn't expect. The question they got most often about the Facet, more than anything about the dial, the movement or delivery times, was when a 40mm version was coming. Not a smaller one. A bigger one. So in August of this year, Circula released the Facet 41\. They did very little press for it, and it is flying off the shelves.

Circula isn't alone in this. Over the past year I've had a lot of casual conversations with people who run watch brands, mostly independents of different sizes, and whenever the topic turned to case sizes the answer was almost always one of two things. Either their larger variants hugely outsell the smaller ones, or customers put so much pressure on them to go bigger that they eventually give in if they can afford it. Almost nobody told me the smaller version was their bestseller, save for a few exceptions.

And then you log onto Reddit. A while back, Seiko released a recreation of one of its vintage watches and increased the diameter from 33mm to 35mm. I remember one person reacting as if Seiko had committed a crime against the original. Two millimeters, on a watch that ended up at 35mm, and the verdict was that it had been ruined because it was now so huge. I'm barely exaggerating.

It helps to remember how we got here. For most of the 20th century, a man's watch was somewhere between 33mm and 36mm. Nobody thought of that as small, because it was simply what a watch was. Things started to change in the late 1990s, when Panerai's big cushion cases went from military curiosity to celebrity accessory, and over the following decade almost every brand followed. By the late 2000s, 44mm was normal for a sports watch and 42mm was considered almost restrained. A whole generation of buyers bought their first serious watch during that period, and for them a 40mm to 44mm watch is what a watch is supposed to look and fit like. The enthusiast correction toward smaller sizes started in earnest in the mid-2010s, and it has been going strong ever since. But it's worth keeping in mind that for most people outside our little world, the big watch is the normal one, and the small watch is the strange new thing.

You can also see the same tension from the other direction. Plenty of brands launched an integrated-bracelet watch at 40mm and then added a smaller version once the enthusiasts made enough noise. Tissot did it with the PRX, which later got 35mm versions. Christopher Ward did it with The Twelve, which launched at 40mm and later added a 36mm and then a 38mm. Circula did the same thing in reverse. It started where the enthusiasts wanted it to start, and then the customers pulled it back toward the middle.

### Two markets, one watch

I want to be fair to the people asking for smaller watches, because I am often one of them. They don't want small, thin watches for no reason. For about 15 years, roughly from the early 2000s until the late 2010s, brands pushed sizes up and up, and a lot of the watches from that period wear badly. They are top heavy, they don't fit under a shirt cuff, and they hang off anyone with a wrist smaller than average. The pushback was necessary, and it has produced some excellent watches. A watch that sits flat is simply more comfortable to wear all day.

The problem is that the pushback happens in a fairly small room. Enthusiast forums, watch Reddit, Instagram comments and, yes, newsletters like this one are an echo chamber. The same few thousand people talk to each other about thickness to a tenth of a millimeter, and after a while it starts to feel like the whole world cares about it. It doesn't.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/15/981552fd-1b67-4d3c-8ad7-fc38a52bf9fb/content/images/2026/10/circula_3.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/15/981552fd-1b67-4d3c-8ad7-fc38a52bf9fb/content/images/2026/10/circula_4.jpg)

There's also a simple structural reason for the gap. Most enthusiasts own several watches and rotate them. If you have eight watches, you can afford to have a 36mm one that you wear twice a month and love for its proportions. Someone who buys one good watch every ten years is in a different position. That watch has to work every day, with everything, and it has to feel like a proper purchase every time they look down at it. For that buyer, a watch that looks a bit small is a much bigger risk than a watch that looks a bit big. I don't think enthusiasts always take that into account when they tell brands what to make.

The general watch buying public seems to fall into two groups, and neither of them is asking for a 36mm sports watch.

The first group doesn't care. I'd bet that most casual watch buyers don't perceive size as a problem at all, and probably never thought that a watch could or should be thinner or narrower. I think Omega has benefited from this more than any other brand. At least for now. The previous generation of the Seamaster Planet Ocean measured 43.5mm wide and 16.1mm thick, and it sold for years while enthusiasts complained about it in every thread where it came up. Omega did eventually slim it down. The 2025 Planet Ocean is 42mm wide and about 13.8mm thick. But a watch that thick was a commercial success for a long time, which tells you how many buyers actually cared.

For some of these buyers, I think a chunkier watch even feels like better value. You're paying a few thousand euros for something, and you want to feel like you got something substantial. It's a lot like the boom of SUVs. SUVs made up 54% of all new cars sold worldwide in 2024\. Very few, if any, of those buyers need ground clearance. They like sitting higher, they like the space, and a bigger car feels like more car for the money. I don't think that's a stupid way to feel about a car, and I don't think it's a stupid way to feel about a watch either. Just not the way I prefer to think about either.

The second group simply doesn't like small watches. I can't tell you how many times I've let non-watch people try on a 38mm sports watch, something like the Facet 38, and they've asked me why it's so small. They are used to watches between 40mm and 45mm, because that is what most watches have been for most of their adult lives. It's very hard to break away from a look you're used to on your own wrist. This happens to me too. If I wear a larger watch for a few days or weeks and then switch to a smaller one, the first few hours feel weird. Then my eyes adjust and I forget about it. But most people don't want to go through those first few hours. People don't want to feel weird.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/15/981552fd-1b67-4d3c-8ad7-fc38a52bf9fb/content/images/2026/10/circula_5.jpg)

Even Rolex seems to have run into this. In 2021, it took the Explorer back to 36mm with the ref. 124270, the original diameter of the 1953 model. Enthusiasts loved it. Two years later, Rolex introduced the Explorer 40, ref. 224270, at 40mm wide and 11.6mm thick, and sold both. Rolex never explains these decisions, so I won't pretend to know the sales numbers. But the sequence looks very familiar.

The point I'm trying to make is not that enthusiasts are wrong. Their taste is fine, and a lot of the time it's better than the market's. The point is that brands need to sell watches to stay in business, and the people who buy the most watches are not the people who write about them online. Circula found a sensible way through this. It didn't replace the 38 with the 41, the way Apple replaced the mini with the Plus. It kept both and priced them the same. So let's look at both.

### What the Facet is

If you haven't come across it, the Facet is Circula's integrated-bracelet steel sports watch, and it was a big step up for the brand. Circula is a family company from Pforzheim, revived in 2018 by Cornelius Huber, and for most of its modern life it made very good tool watches around the €1,000 mark using Sellita movements. The Facet moved it into a different bracket. It was designed with Guy Bove, who ran creative departments at TAG Heuer and several other big Swiss brands and who also worked with Circula on the ProFlight. It was the first Circula with a La Joux-Perret movement, and the finishing is noticeably more involved than on anything else they make. Circula files it under GADA, the Go Anywhere, Do Anything watch, which is a marketing term for a watch you can wear with a suit and also to the beach. But no joke, the Facet really works both with a suit and at the beach.

The design idea is right there in the name. Almost every surface of the case and bracelet is a flat plane cut at an angle, and the edges between them alternate between brushed and polished finishes. There are hardly any curves when you look at it from above. The bezel is made of two sloped rings stacked on top of each other, and that double slope is what makes the watch look so busy in the light. When I first saw photos of it, I worried that it would be a bit much. In person, it's perfection. 

### The cases, side by side

Here are the numbers. The Facet 38 is 38mm wide, 9.9mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 44.5mm. The Facet 41 is 41mm wide, 10.4mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 47.6mm. Both are 316L stainless steel, both have a flat sapphire crystal with anti-reflective coating on the inside, and both are water resistant to 100 meters. Both have an exhibition caseback held down by four screws. One difference you won't see in photos is the crown. The 41 gets a screw-down crown, while the 38's crown pushes in. Water resistance is the same either way, but I like the screw-down crown better on a watch that's supposed to go swimming.

The interesting number is the thickness. The diameter grows by 3mm, but the case only gets half a millimeter thicker. So the 41 is actually the slimmer looking watch of the two, proportionally. From the side, the 38 looks a little more compact and dense, while the 41 looks flatter and wider. Neither of them is thick. A 10.4mm steel sports watch with 100 meters of water resistance is a very reasonable package. Actually, no, more than reasonable. More watches need to have these dimensions.

I've written before that diameter is only one part of how big a watch wears, and that you should look at lug-to-lug first. The Facet is a good example. The difference in diameter is 3mm, and the difference in lug-to-lug is 3.1mm, so the 41 grows evenly in both directions. There's no trick here where a bigger diameter hides behind short lugs. What you see on the spec sheet is what you get on the wrist.

The lug-to-lug is where the size difference really shows. At 44.5mm, the Facet 38 will fit pretty much any wrist. At 47.6mm, the 41 is still fine for an average wrist, but it is a real step up and you'd want to try it on if your wrist is on the smaller side. It helps that the bracelet is integrated, so the first link drops down right where the case ends and the watch hugs the wrist rather than sticking out past it. On my 20cm wrist, both watches fit without any overhang, of course. The 38 looked tidy and compact. The 41 looked like what most people expect a steel sports watch to look like. And I'll have to admit, I would certainly go for the 41mm variant.

Here's something I didn't expect. With the two watches side by side, I think the faceting works better at 41mm. The flat surfaces are bigger, so each one catches more light, and the polished edges have more room between them. On the 38, everything is a bit more condensed. It's still excellent, but if the faceted case is the reason you want this watch, the larger case gives it more space. 

### The dial

Both watches had the petrol dial, a deep blue-green. I liked it at the launch and I like it even more now. It's a color that goes with almost anything you wear, which is the whole idea of a watch like this.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/15/981552fd-1b67-4d3c-8ad7-fc38a52bf9fb/content/images/2026/10/circula_6.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/15/981552fd-1b67-4d3c-8ad7-fc38a52bf9fb/content/images/2026/10/circula_7.jpg)

The center of the dial is stamped with a pattern of small rectangles arranged in concentric rings, a reference to the teeth of the gear wheel in Circula's logo. The cool thing is that the patter isn't perfect. The rectangles shift around a bit in the lineup, which gives it a wonderful organic look. Around it is a slightly raised minute track with circular brushing, and around that a sloped flange printed with numerals every five minutes in a typeface Circula designed themselces. The applied indices are faceted and filled with Super-LumiNova BGW9, which glows blue. The hands are faceted, diamond-cut, polished and rhodium-plated, also filled with BGW9\. I love BGW9 and there's plenty of it here. It's one of the better lume experiences I've had with a watch. There's a date window at six, with a date disc in the dial color, so it doesn't interrupt the dial.

The texture is the best thing about the dial. Depending on the angle, the stamped rectangles go from almost invisible to very prominent. On the 41, there's simply more of it, since the central part of the dial is bigger. That's the main visual difference between the two sizes from the front. The proportions of the hands, indices and date window look the same to me, and I couldn't spot any change in the layout. 

One thing to know if you're choosing a color. On the Facet 41, the patterned dial is only available in petrol and white. The blue and the anthracite versions of the 41 use a different finish, a fine grainy texture. On the 38, the patterned dial comes in more colors, and the 38 also has its own grainy options in purple, turquoise and white. So if you want the gear pattern in blue or anthracite, it's the 38 for you. I'd go petrol on either size.

### The movement

Inside both watches is the La Joux-Perret G100, in the Soigné grade. It runs at 4Hz with a power reserve of 68 hours and 24 jewels. It hacks, it can be hand wound, it has KIF shock protection and a ball-bearing rotor. Circula regulates it in Pforzheim to -5/+7 seconds per day. Through the caseback you'll see a palladium-coated tungsten rotor decorated with the same pattern as the dial, which is a nice touch.

The G100 was a big change for Circula, as their other watches use the Sellita SW200-1\. It's not a clone of the ETA 2824 like the Sellita, and the main practical advantage is that power reserve. 68 hours means you can take the watch off on Friday evening and it will still be running on Monday morning. For a watch at this price, I wouldn't ask for more.

### The bracelet

The bracelet is fully integrated and continues the faceting of the case all the way down. The links are screwed, and there's a quick-release system so you can take it off without tools. The bracelet tapers toward the clasp, which keeps it comfortable even with the larger case.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/15/981552fd-1b67-4d3c-8ad7-fc38a52bf9fb/content/images/2026/10/circula_8.jpg)

There are two clasp options. The standard one is a butterfly clasp, which disappears into the bracelet and looks very clean. The other option is a folding clasp with tool-free extension, which costs €50 more. My review 41 came with the extension clasp, while the 38 came on the buttefly clasp. While the butterfly looks better, I would for sure go for the folding clasp which makes the watch much more comfortable. 

If you don't want the bracelet, there's also a suede leather strap in the dial color with quick release, made in southern Germany. It's a good strap, but a watch like this is designed around its bracelet, and I wouldn't buy it without one.

### Prices, and which one to get

The pricing is the same for both sizes. On the suede strap, the Facet costs €1,690\. On the bracelet with the butterfly clasp, it's €1,990\. With the extension folding clasp, it's €2,040\. Both are available now on the Circula website.

At this price, you're getting a properly finished steel sports watch with a Swiss movement that has a long power reserve, made in Germany, with one of the better bracelets in this bracket. I think it's a very good deal, and I'd put it up against watches that cost quite a bit more.

It's also worth pointing out what Circula didn't do. It would have been easy to charge a bit more for the bigger watch, since it uses more steel and it's the one people are asking for. It would have been just as easy to quietly let the 38 fade out once the 41 started selling. Circula did neither. Both sizes cost the same, both come in multiple colors, and the 38 still has the wider choice of patterned dials. For a small company, keeping two sizes of the same watch in production means double the cases, double the bracelets and more stock sitting on shelves. I appreciate that they're carrying the cost of that, instead of making the choice for us.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/98/15/981552fd-1b67-4d3c-8ad7-fc38a52bf9fb/content/images/2026/10/circula_9.jpg)

So which one should you buy? I liked both a lot, and I mean that. If you already know you like smaller watches, get the 38\. It's the more compact of the two, and it's one of the best 38mm sports watches you can buy for the money. If you're used to wearing watches over 40mm, or if you've ever put on a 38mm watch and felt like something was missing, get the 41\. There's nothing wrong with that, and you're the reason this watch exists.

Apple made the small phone, watched it fail, and took it away. Circula made the small watch, listened when people asked for a bigger one, and kept selling both. That's the better outcome for everyone. Try them both on if you can, and buy the one that feels right on your wrist rather than the one that sounds right on Reddit. See both [on the Circula website](http://circulawatches.com/?ref=itsabouttime.email).

\-Vuk