Seiko Celebrates With New Presage Classic Series; Favre Leuba Adds Power Reserve To Deep Raider; Micromilspec And Black Badger Team Up Again; Isotope's Straw Marquetry Mercury; Three New MB&F's

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. Hope everyone had a good weekend.

In this issue

• Seiko Celebrates 145 Years With Two New Presage Classic Series Limited Editions

• Favre Leuba Adds A Power Reserve Display And Small Seconds To The Deep Raider

• Micromilspec And Black Badger Get All Exposive With The Dualtimer Broken Hour

• Isotope And Straw Marquetry Artist Bernardo d'Orey Create A One-Off Mercury

• MB&F Brings Coloured Gemstones To The LM Perpetual For The First Time

👂What’s new

1/

Seiko Celebrates 145 Years With Two New Presage Classic Series Limited Editions

Seiko has now released Arita porcelain dials often enough that the technique no longer needs introduction — I’ve covered the glazed version, the unglazed version, and a bunch of previous colorways — but the HCC007 is doing something a bit different . It's the first porcelain Presage to use a deep cobalt blue glaze tied to "Seiko Blue," a specific tone the brand developed in the 1960s. The dial was produced under master craftsman Hiroyuki Hashiguchi's supervision, with execution by Toshiaki Kawaguchi's team in Arita, and the main challenge wasn't the material itself but getting the glaze right: transparent enough that the relief pattern underneath remains visible, yet dense enough to hold that saturated blue. Its companion, the HCC004, takes the opposite approach entirely — no saturated color, no glazed surface, just a textured white dial referencing shironeri, the particular tone produced during silk refining.

The HCC007 gets a new case, 39.6mm wide and 12.8mm thick — slightly trimmer than the 40.6mm shell on most recent Presage Craftsmanship releases. The HCC004 goes smaller still at 36mm wide and 12.5mm thick, with softly curved surfaces and a coin-finished bezel that suit its classical positioning. Both get double domed sapphire crystals, sapphire casebacks, and super-hard coating on the steel. Water resistance differs: 30 meters on the HCC004, which is the usual trade-off with these dials, and a more reassuring 100 meters on the HCC007.

The blue glaze on the HCC007 is deep and layered, with the radiating relief pattern beneath the surface reads differently straight-on versus at an angle, and the applied markers and hands provide clean legibility. The HCC004’s woven-like texture is the more subtle option, and the blue hands and markers pulled from the same "Seiko Blue" identity give the pair a coherent thread without making them feel like a matched set.

Both watches have the calibre 6R51 inside, Seiko's in-house automatic beating at 21,600vph with a 72-hour power reserve. The watches come on leather straps from an LWG-certified tannery with folding clasps.

The Seiko Presage Classic Series Limited Edition HCC004 is priced at €1,050, limited to 2,500 pieces, and goes on sale in June 2026. You can see it here. The Seiko Presage Classic Series Craftsmanship Arita Porcelain Dial Limited Edition HCC007 is priced at €1,800, limited to 1,500 pieces, and goes on sale in July 2026. See that one here.

2/

Favre Leuba Adds A Power Reserve Display And Small Seconds To The Deep Raider

Favre Leuba has been around since 1737 but has had a complicated relationship with staying in business. They relaunched with 22 new watches at Geneva Watch Days in 2024, and since then have been cranking out a steady stream of new releases. Now, they’re expading the Deep Raider line with the Power Reserve variant keeps the same bones but adds a a couple of complications: small seconds, a power reserve indicator, and a triple-figure date.

The case is unchanged from the existing Deep Raider Renaissance — 40mm wide, 12.59mm thick, stainless steel with tapered lugs and alternating brushed and polished surfaces. On top is a ceramic unidirectional bezel with a luminous pip, on the side is a screw-in crown, and you get 300 meters of water resistance.

Five dial colours are offered at launch: white, black, green, blue, and ice blue, all with a sunray finish. The small seconds sits at 9 o'clock, the power reserve indicator at 6, and the triple-figure date runs vertically at 3. Each sub-dial gets a snailed texture and a metallic frame.

Inside is the FLP01 calibre, which is Favre Leuba's designation for the Sellita SW279-1. It runs at 28,800 vibrations per hour with a 41-hour power reserve. The watch comes on an integrated steel bracelet with brushed and polished links and a butterfly clasp; and all rubber straps from the existing Deep Raider Renaissance are compatible with this model as well.

The Favre Leuba Deep Raider Power Reserve is priced at CHF 2,500. See more on the Favre Leuba website.

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Micromilspec And Black Badger Get All Exposive With The Dualtimer Broken Hour

When Micromilspec and James Thompson — the designer known as Black Badger — released the Project Sabotage Milgraph last year, I loved the watch even before I read the story around it. And then I loved it even more. A space pirate named Black Badger, a tyrannical Chrono Sovereign, a universe where time is currency… I love it when a watch is accompanied by a great story. For the second team-up, the two have leaned into that universe further. The result is the Broken Hour, a GMT riff on the Dualtimer that looks like it survived something it probably shouldn't have.

The Broken Hour uses a 42mm wide, 12.5mm thick microblasted stainless steel case, with the same integrated construction that should help it fit more wrists. Water resistance is 200 meters, and the case has a screw-down crown and the same QuadGrip dive bezel from the Milgraph, here calibrated for 60 minutes rather than elapsed time. The 24-hour GMT scale gets relocated off the bezel and onto an orange chapter ring surrounding the dial.

That orange chapter ring frames a white dial with black minute track and applied hour markers in white Super-LumiNova. The storytelling details are everywhere once you look: the date window at 3 o'clock appears "blasted open," with surrounding markers distorted as if caught in the explosion, and both the hour hand and GMT hand have fractured profiles.

Inside is the Sellita SW330-2, a caller-style GMT that lets you independently adjust the 24-hour hand without moving the local hour hand. It beats at 28,800 vph with a 56-hour power reserve. The caseback continues the story — it reportedly previews the next chapter of Black Badger's adventures. The watch comes on either an orange rubber strap with a microblasted steel buckle or a matching microblasted stainless steel bracelet.

The Micromilspec × Black Badger Broken Hour is available through a single 24-hour sales window, opening May 29th at 18:00 CEST and closing May 30th at the same time. All orders placed during the window will be fulfilled. Price is set at $1,950 on rubber and $2,200 on the bracelet, and every watch comes with a 12 page comic book. See more on the Micromilspec website.

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Isotope And Straw Marquetry Artist Bernardo d'Orey Create A One-Off Mercury

UK-based Isotope has made a habit of putting unusual dials into the Mercury case, but this one is unlike anything they've done before. And it uses one of my absolute all time favorite techniques. The dial here is the work of Bernardo d'Orey, a micro-marquetry artist who works in straw, cutting, shaping, and placing each fragment entirely by hand. This is the new Mercury Fire Horse Marquetry.

The Mercury case is 38mm wide and 10mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 44.50mm — a compact, comfortable to wear watch. It's all 316L stainless steel with a mirror finish. The mirror-polished crown at 3 o'clock carries Isotope's Lacrima logo. A domed anti-reflection-treated sapphire crystal sits up top, and the screw-in caseback is also sapphire, giving you a clear view of the movement. Water resistance is 100 meters.

The dial is composed of 100 individual straw sections — each one selected, cut, shaped, and placed by hand — arranged to reflect the Year of the Horse and the Chinese element of Fire. Straw marquetry reacts to light differently at every angle, so the dial shifts as the watch moves, catching and releasing color in ways that are hard to photograph. The hands are mirror-finished steel, custom to the Mercury.

Inside is Isotope's Calibre I-7, essentially a hand-wound, modified and regulated ETA Peseux 7001 running at 21,600vph with a 42-hour power reserve. The bespoke bridge is hand-finished. It comes on a quick-release suede strap — grey or beige — with a mirror-finish signed buckle.

The Isotope Mercury Fire Horse Marquetry is a piece unique, priced at £6,000 including taxes. See more on the Isotope website.

5/

MB&F Brings Coloured Gemstones To The LM Perpetual For The First Time

Stephen McDonnell's perpetual calendar has always been one the most intellectually serious thing in MB&F's lineup — a 581-component movement that inverted every convention of the complication, built around a "mechanical processor" that eliminates the fragility of traditional perpetual calendar mechanisms and exposes everything dial-side: balance wheel floating at centre, suspended calendar rings, lacquered sub-dial at noon. It has appeared in gold and titanium across a dozen references. Now, they’re adding three more variants with the LM Perpetual Chromatic Editions that have colored stoned bezels.

The case is unchanged from earlier LM Perpetuals — 44mm wide, 17.5mm thick, with a heavily domed sapphire crystal that follows the arc of the flying V bridge holding the balance. Two of the cases are done in 18k white gold, one in 18k red gold. The three models are differentiated by their bezels, all of which have 48 baguette-cut gemstones set by hand at STG Creation in Geneva. The white gold models get blue or purple sapphires sourced from Madagascar and Sri Lanka respectively; the red gold gets Mozambican rubies.

The black sub-dials float above the movement as before, with time at noon and calendar functions distributed across the lower half. The chromatic logic runs through to the hands: blue PVD on the sapphire model, purple PVD on the other, 5N PVD on the ruby version.

The manually wound movement provides a 72-hour power reserve from twin barrels visible through the caseback, alongside the hand finishing — anglage, perlage, côtes de Genève — that has always made this calibre worth turning over. The strap is white rubber on all three.

The LM Perpetual Chromatic Editions are limited to eight pieces each, priced at CHF 228,000, without taxes. See more on the MB&F 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

• San Antonio Spurs player Victor Wembanyama is a generational talent, combining a 7-foot-4 frame with an unprecedented skill set. After Wembanyama’s second season was cut short by a blood clot, his agent, Bouna Ndiaye, sought unconventional ways to help him grow—physically, mentally, and spiritually. Ndiaye sent Wembanyama to the Shaolin Temple in China’s Henan province, where Master Yan’an, a 34th-generation Shaolin Warrior monk, put him through a customized training program: 4:30 a.m. wake-ups, hours of meditation, and kung fu forms focused on controlling his center of gravity. ESPN‘s Ramona Shelburne takes us inside the retreat—and shows how the intense training has transformed Wembanyama’s game.

• Shawn Stewart was arrested for a dangerous infatuation with his drug counselor. She had proof, in the form of emails and texts, and said she feared for her life. But nothing was as it seemed.

• Under stage lights and casino fluorescents, Scott Ian has lived two lives: thrash-metal lifer and improbably serious poker grinder. What began as a celebrity lark turned into late-night study, coaching, and high-stakes obsession, with Anthrax tours and online tables colliding in one double life. But what really pulled him deeper—the cards, or the chaos?

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One video you have to watch today

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