Ming and Massena LAB Put the Honeycomb Dial in Motion With the 57.09 Secret Honey

Ming and Massena LAB, William Massena’s design studio, first worked together in 2021 on the 17.09 Honey, which had that honeycomb pattern. So what gives? Are they just re-releasing that watch again? Well, no... The 57.09 Secret Honey looks like a plain dark brown dial until it starts moving. This time the pattern is built from rotating sapphire discs, so it changes through the day. That has to be quite the sight up close.

The case is grade 5 titanium, 40mm wide and 10.17mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 47.8mm. There’s a polished concave bezel on top, sapphire crystals on both sides and you get 100 meters of water resistance. But that's the boring part. The lugs, on the other hand, aren't boring. They use Ming’s three-step design, and each step gets its own finish: bare titanium on the outside, a TiN coating that looks like yellow gold in the middle, and a TiSiN coating that looks like rose gold on the inside. The ring under the bezel is TiN as well.

The base dial is brass, lacquered dark brown and circular brushed. Just an unrelated note: we need more brown dials. Above it sit three sapphire discs with anti-reflective coating. One turns once a day, one every 12 hours and one every hour, and each is a different color with a different pattern of cut-outs. As the openings line up and drift apart, the honeycomb appears and changes. Ming calls this “dynamic guilloché.” The hour and minute markings are printed on the two faster discs and glow orange. The indices and both logos are engraved into the underside box sapphire crystal and filled with Ming’s Polar White lume, which sounds a bit like a marketing gimmick but is actually the whitest lume I've ever seen. Maybe truly the only pure white lume.

Inside is the Ming 330.M2, which is a heavily modified Sellita SW330 GMT architecture, which is where the 24-hour disc comes from. Ming has skeletonized the bridges, brushed them and coated the bridges and mainplate in anthracite. It beats at 4Hz (28,800vph) with about 50 hours of power reserve. You get two straps: vachetta goat leather from Jean Rousseau Paris and black FKM rubber, both with quick-release spring bars and a steel flying-blade tuck buckle with micro-adjustment.

The Ming x Massena LAB 57.09 Secret Honey is limited to 125 pieces, priced at CHF 7,250 before tax. Orders open today, October 15, at 1:00 PM GMT. See more on the Ming website.