Ming Puts a Hammered Pewter Dial Into A Titanium Case; Bell & Ross Embraces Sage; Baltic Adds Date To Aquascaphe MK2; Parmigiani's Platinum Trilogy Of Complications Is Sensational; Vincent Deprez's Scientific Tourbillon

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Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. I’ve always wondered why people were so upset if a watch doesn’t have a date complication. And I do mean upset. It’s not just a dealbreaker to them, they get angry at the watch for not having it. What’s up with that? Every watch looks better without a date.

In this issue

• MING Puts a Hammered Pewter Dial Into Its 37-Series Titanium Case

• Bell & Ross Embraces Sage With The BR-05 GMT Green Steel

• Baltic Adds The Date People Kept Asking For To The Aquascaphe MK2

• Parmigiani Fleurier Turns Thirty With A Platinum Trilogy Of Complications That Vanish On Command

• Vincent Deprez Rethinks His Geneva Tourbillon As A Scientific Instrument

👂What’s new

1/

MING Puts a Hammered Pewter Dial Into Its 37-Series Titanium Case

MING has never been shy about asking a lot from a dial, but pewter is new territory even for them. This 88-piece limited edition comes out of a collaboration with Royal Selangor, the Kuala Lumpur pewter house that's been at it since 1885. The collaboration started with a MING patron and his camera. He'd asked Royal Selangor to reskin the camera, then asked Ming Thein if he'd help collect it in Kuala Lumpur. That errand turned into a long lunch between Thein and Yong Yoon Li, Royal Selangor's CEO, and the friendship (plus this watch) came directly out of that conversation. Royal Selangor itself goes back to 1885, when Yong Koon, a young pewtersmith from Shantou, arrived in the tin-rich state of Selangor and started making incense burners and candlestands for temples and tin miners.

The case is MING's familiar 37-series in grade-2 titanium, 38mm wide and 11.05mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 44.73mm and a 20mm lug width. It's all-brushed and weighs 35.9 grams, which is barely anything on the wrist. Water resistance is 100 meters, and the caseback carries both the MING and Royal Selangor wordmarks. Domed sapphire crystals front and rear both get double-sided anti-reflective coating.

But what is pewter? It's a tin-based alloy, strengthened with small amounts of copper and antimony. Royal Selangor's version is nearly 97-percent tin, which meets the highest international standard for the material. What makes it interesting for a watch dial is that it doesn't tarnish or corrode easily, and over time it develops a soft patina. The manufacturing process is still largely manual: the metals are melted together, poured into steel moulds, left to cool, then filed, polished, and finished mostly by hand. It's rarely used in watchmaking, which only makes it interesting. Royal Selangor hand-hammers every dial for a very cool texture. Like many Ming watches, there are no markers on the dial. Instead, the front crystal is engraved with the hour track and markers, and filled with Super-LumiNova X1, matched by X1-coated hands.

Inside is the Sellita for MING SW300.M1, an automatic with roughly 50 hours of power reserve, and quite beautiful to look at with skeletonized rhodium-plated bridges over an anthracite baseplate. The strap is a blue-grey goat leather from Jean Rousseau with curved quick-release bars and a flying-blade tuck buckle, and it arrives in a hammered pewter presentation box made by Royal Selangor.

The MING 37.06 Royal Selangor is limited to 88 pieces, priced at CHF 5,000 without taxes. The watches will be available through Royal Selangor boutiques from today, 30 July 2026 and via the Ming website from 6 August. See more on the Ming website.

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Bell & Ross Embraces Sage With The BR-05 GMT Green Steel

Bell & Ross has decided 2026 is the year of green. I think this might be their third green watch they released this year. I’m not complaining, as each one is a very interesting take on the color. This latest one comes in the form of the BR-05 GMT Green Steel which, as the name suggests, adds a GMT complication to the familiar cockpit-instrument shape.

The case is 41mm wide and a slim 11mm thick, in satin-finished and polished steel with a screw-down crown and crown guard. Water resistance is 100 meters, the sapphire crystal gets anti-reflective coating, and the caseback is sapphire so you can watch the 360° rotor do its work.

Bell & Ross calls the dial sage green with silver reflections, and the shade comes from a three-step process: sunray brushing on a metal base, a tinted green varnish, then a clear glossy coat over the top. Indices and numerals are polished rhodium-plated appliques filled with Super-LumiNova X1 that glows green, matched by skeletonised rhodium hands including the arrow-tipped GMT hand. The two-tone 24-hour flange in green and silver indicates the second time zone.

Inside is the calibre BR-CAL.325-1, an automatic with a 54-hour power reserve, with the GMT hand quick-set independently of the main hour hand, making it a traveller style GMT. It’s based on the Sellita SW330-1. It comes on your choice of green rubber or a satin-and-polished steel bracelet with a folding buckle.

The Bell & Ross BR-05 GMT Green Steel is available now, priced at €5,800. See more on the Bell & Ross website.

3/

Baltic Adds The Date People Kept Asking For To The Aquascaphe MK2

When Baltic reworked the Aquascaphe into the MK2 platform last September, the one thing the new version didn't offer was a date. And some people took that personally. I can’t even begin to count the number of Reddit comments that said they would buy the watch in a heartbeat if only it had a date (I’m lying, it’s probably like 7 comments, I’m just too lazy to go down that rabbit-hole). Well, here’s your chance if you were waiting, because Baltic just added the date complication to both sizes of the MK2 Aquascaphe.

Instead of the usual 3 o'clock cutout, the date sits at 6 o'clock. That keeps the dial symmetrical, and the date disc is color matched to each dial. While I’m certainly not a date fan, this is the best way to integrate it if we must have one. Everything else is the MK2 you already know: 37mm or 39.5mm stainless steel cases, Lumicast solid ceramic markers, larger hands with a generous helping of Super-LumiNova, and a fully graduated unidirectional bezel. The four dial colors remain unchanged, Blue, Grey, Green and Warm Silver, with the date at 6 o'clock the only thing separating the Date from the standard version.

The Date swaps the no-date Miyota 9039 for the Miyota calibre 9015, an automatic running at 4Hz with roughly 42 hours of power reserve. Strap options are unchanged, with a color matched rubber strap option or one of Baltic's steel bracelets.

The Aquascaphe MK2 Date is available now across the full collection, both sizes and all four colors, starting at €805.65 on rubber against €774.90 for the no-date version. See more on the Baltic website.

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Parmigiani Fleurier Turns Thirty With A Platinum Trilogy Of Complications That Vanish On Command

Thirty years in, Parmigiani Fleurier is celebrating the way a company confident in its own taste tends to: understatedly, expensively, and with an extremely well defined sense of self. And they’re continuing their 30th anniversary with a trio of Tonda PF watches that all share the same two tricks: first, they are made out of solid platinum, and second, they all have hidden complications that show up at a press of a button. The GMT Rattrapante hides a second time zone, the Minute Rattrapante hides a countdown hand, and the Chronographe Mystérieux hides an entire flyback chronograph. I love these watches so, so, much.

All three cases measure 40mm wide, with the two rattrapante models at 10.7mm thick and the chronograph at 13mm. Everything is made out of 950 platinum, dial included, with the knurled bezels and integrated bracelets that define the Tonda PF look. Sapphire crystals front and back on all of them. All three also come on fully platinum integrated bracelets. I can only imagine how heavy this thing is on wrist. Water resistance is where the three models are most different, and it’s counterintuitive: the two rattrapantes get 60 meters while the most complicated watch, the chronograph, gets 100 meters.

Like I said, everything on these watches is platinum, including the dials which have a wonderful non-reflective sandblasted finish. Perfectly executed. Contrasting with the bright silver platinum are the 18k gold indices. On the GMT, a white gold hand shows local time and an 18k rose gold hand shows home time; press the pusher in the crown and the local hand catches up to swallow the rose gold one, leaving a plain two-hander. The Minute Rattrapante does the same thing with a rose gold countdown hand you advance in one- or five-minute steps using teardrop pushers, then snap back under the main minute hand when you're done. The Chronographe Mystérieux is the masterpiece: the three time hands reset and take over chronograph duty while two rose gold hands emerge to keep telling the time, no subdials anywhere. What an incredible watch this is.

The GMT uses the automatic calibre PF051 and the Minute Rattrapante the PF052, both with gold micro-rotors, both beating at 3Hz with a 48-hour power reserve. The chronograph gets the purpose-built PF053, an automatic integrated monopusher column-wheel movement beating at 4Hz with a longer 60-hour reserve, operated by a single pusher on the case flank at 7:30.

The celebratory Parmigiani Fleurier Tonda PF watches are limited to 30 examples each, available individually or as a set of three. The Tonda PF GMT Rattrapante is priced at CHF 91,000, the Minute Rattrapante at CHF 93,000, and the Chronographe Mystérieux at CHF 99,600. See more on the Parmigiani Fleurier website.

5/

Vincent Deprez Rethinks His Geneva Tourbillon As A Scientific Instrument

Vincent Deprez trained at Vacheron Constantin and did restoration work at Patek Philippe before going out on his own. Now he builds his tourbillons by hand, one at a time, in a Geneva workshop stocked with old machine tools rather than a bank of CNC cutters. He made his name with the Tourbillon Classique Souscription, a very accomplished debut, and the new Scientific Tourbillon is the evolution of the concept. However, where the earlier watches leaned classical, this one takes its cues from twentieth-century instrument watches: legible, technical, stripped of ornament.

The case is 39mm wide and 11.3mm thick in stainless steel, with a mix of polished and satin surfaces that give it the more modern look compared to the polished Classic series. On top is a domed sapphire crystal, while out back is a Grade 5 titanium caseback that integrates directly into the case middle and secures through the lugs, leaving a completely flat profile with no break in the line. Water resistance is 30 meters.

While the case gets slight updates for a more contemporary look, it’s the dial that gets the majority of changes. The earlier Tourbillon Classique put the regulator front and center under a big straight bridge. Here a midnight-blue grand feu enamel time dial sits at 12 o'clock, ringed by a mirror-polished applied steel chapter ring with a detailed minute track. Deprez fires each dial himself. The tourbillon below, with its blue seconds ring around the one-minute cage, is still quite the beautiful thing to behold.

The hand-wound movement is very familiar from previous variants, and most of it is made by hand in the workshop: bridges and plates cut on pantograph engravers, wheels, pivots and pinions turned on vintage lathes. It beats at a traditional 2.5Hz with roughly a 52-hour reserve. Finishing is entirely manual, German silver bridges done with graining, anglage, satin and black polishing. The watch comes on a grained calfskin strap.

Now, for a number of pieces of bad news, the main of which is that you’ll never own this. Not because it’s ridiculously expensive. We don’t know the cost, but it shouldn’t be extreme for this level of watch. While many in this category ask for multiples of three figures, the earlier Tourbillon Classique was CHF 89,500 so you can expect this one to be around the same level. The bigger problem is that this watch is limited to 10 pieces, and all 10 have been sold. Why write about it then, you ask? Well, it’s a very nice watch, so I find it good to document its existance. See more on the Vincent Deprez website.

⏲️End links

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

• Fifa essentially announced the other day that they will be selling the World Cup to Donald Trump, which is as insane a sentence I could imagine ever writing. Which is why this analysis from The Athletic on how massive of a financial juggernaut the WC has become (meaning that Trump and his lackeys will get the event for an absolute bargain) is even more of an insightful read than it was last week.

• On a sunlit cliff above Ithaca’s wine-dark sea, a translator chases Homer’s ghosts—through caves, across languages, into the raw machinery of rage, love, and survival. Emily Wilson strips the epics to their pulse, unsettling centuries of reverence. But what happens when clarity exposes the violence we’ve learned to admire—and ourselves within it?

• Terry Ellis’s fixer wore an overcoat, a multicolored ascot, a Rolex. He had a husky voice and a good suntan. He reminded Ellis of the English actor Ray Winstone, best known for playing hard men in films like Sexy Beast and The Departed. Ellis, who was himself a hard man, sought inspiration from crime movies, the way an artist scrutinizes the canvases of the great masters. It was a viewing of Ocean’s Eleven that had led to the most successful phase of his criminal career. By the winter of 2007, Ellis had become one of his generation’s most dependable, and accomplished, heistmen.

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Vuk