The Citizen Wrapped In Hand-Dyed Washi Paper; Ollech & Wajs Brings Back A Favorite 24-hour Watch; Elka And Ace's 36mm Essence; Czapek's Denim Meteorite Antarctique ; A New Level For Greubel Forsey

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. Nothing smart from me today, I’m late for kindergarten pickup!

In this issue

• The Citizen Wraps A 50th-Anniversary Eco-Drive In Hand-Dyed Indigo Washi Paper

• Ollech & Wajs Brings Back Its Founder's Favorite 24-hour Watch For The Brand's 70th Anniversary

• Elka And Ace Jewelers Make Their Incredible Essence Dial Even More Attractive At 36mm

• Czapek Freezes A 600-Million-Year-Old Meteorite In Denim Blue On The Antarctique

• Greubel Forsey's Balancier Debuts Its New Qualité Musée Seal Of Incredible Finishings

👂What’s new

1/

The Citizen Wraps A 50th-Anniversary Eco-Drive In Hand-Dyed Indigo Washi Paper

The 50th anniversary of making light-powered watches has been a good one to Citizen, with a bunch of really cool watches. One of them is the new AQ4094-58L, part of The Citizen, the brand's high-accuracy line that rarely gets the attention it deserves. But just look at it. It’s a beauty.

The case is 40mm wide and 12.20mm thick, made from Super Titanium, Citizen's hardened proprietary titanium. Both case and bracelet get a Duratect Platinum treatment, which adds a bright metallic sheen and bumps surface hardness even further. There’s a sapphire crystal on top and you get 100 meters of water resistance.

The dial is the reason you want to buy this watch. It is made from Tosa washi, a traditional Japanese paper, hand-dyed through a natural lye fermentation process to reach a deep indigo called Kachi-iro, a color historically tied to victory. The paper texture stays visible under the dye, and light still passes through to feed the Eco-Drive cell beneath. The gold applied markers and matching date frame sit beautifully against all that purple. The hands and markers are lumed to keeps thing practical.

Inside is Citizen's Caliber A060, a light-powered quartz movement accurate to ±5 seconds per year, which puts it in rare company among non-radio-controlled watches. It also has a perpetual calendar that sorts month lengths and leap years on its own, and uses the seconds hand to display calendar information during setting. Full charge gives 18 months in power-save mode. The strap is a Super Titanium bracelet with a folding clasp.

The Citizen AQ4094-58L is available now, priced at $3,095, limited to 400 examples. See more on the Citizen website.

2/

Ollech & Wajs Brings Back Its Founder's Favorite 24-hour Watch For The Brand's 70th Anniversary

In 1965, Ollech & Wajs built a 24-hour watch named after the Early Bird satellite, the first geosynchronous communications relay, which carried the live transatlantic feed of the Apollo coverage and a Beatles broadcast to 700 million people. The watch wasn't for astronauts. It was sold through classified ads in the Army Times to pilots and radio operators who actually needed 24-hour time. Fewer than 500 were made, it was reportedly Albert Wajs's personal favorite, and the EB-24 is the modern relaunch, timed to the brand's platinum anniversary.

The case is 39.5mm wide and 12.5mm thick, made out of brushed 316L stainless steel made in the Swiss Jura, with a screwed caseback and crown, with a sapphire crystal with anti-reflective treatment, and 300 meters of water resistance. The bidirectional friction bezel has an anodized aluminum insert in blue and red, the same primary material as the satellite that inspired it. Lug-to-lug is 48mm.

The black base dial runs on full 24-hour time, so the hour hand makes one rotation per day rather than two, which lets you read the whole day at a glance and track a second zone at the same time. Hands and indexes are filled with white Super-LumiNova.

Inside is a bespoke Soprod P125, automatic, running at 4Hz with 25 jewels and a 42-hour power reserve. O&W has it adjusted in three positions to -7/+7 seconds per day, with an engraved rotor and platine and custom screws. It ships on a black Italian leather and linen strap finished in Switzerland with a signed thorn buckle. The 1960s-style M-Link steel bracelet is an optional extra.

The EB-24 goes on sale today, June 30, at 19:56 CET, priced at CHF 1,956. See more on the Ollech & Wajs website, but later in the day when the watch goes online.

3/

Elka And Ace Jewelers Make Their Incredible Essence Dial Even More Attractive At 36mm

You already know that I’m a massive fan of the collaborations Ace Jewelers, the Amsterdam-and-London-based retailer, has been behind. They’re varied, imaginative, expertly ideated and often super fun. But perhaps the best collaboration they have done has been the one with Elka, stripping the dials of everything and rendering them in a brushed finish and deep color that brands many times its price could envy. Those Essence watches were cool, but some have found them to be too large. Well, they just fixed that with the new with 50 numbered examples of the blue Essence dial in Elka's compact N-Series.

The stainless steel case measures 36mm wide and 10.5mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 41.1mm. Those are some pretty good proportions, helped along with the rounded profile, soft lugs, a smooth bezel, and a chevé sapphire box crystal that gives the dial that domed, slightly vintage look. Water resistance is 50 meters, and a sapphire back shows the movement.

The dial is the show stopper here. Blue sunburst, no markers, no numerals, just the Elka signature at 12 o'clock and a set of non-luminous nickel-colored baton hands sweeping a central seconds. Without fixed reference points your eye stops counting hours and starts watching the hands move across the surface, and the sunburst keeps shifting as the light changes. It’s a fantastic experience.

Inside is the La Joux-Perret G101 automatic, running at 4Hz with a 68-hour power reserve, stop seconds, and regulation in four positions to +/- 7 seconds per day. A solid, modern, third-party calibre. You get three options of wearing the watch: cognac leather, blue leather, or a stainless steel beads-of-rice bracelet.

The N-Series Essence is available now, priced at €2,180 on leather and €2,230 on the bracelet, limited to 50 numbered examples. See more on the Ace Jewelers website.

4/

Czapek Freezes A 600-Million-Year-Old Meteorite In Denim Blue On The Antarctique

I’m not a huge fan of meteorite dial. They always seem kind of gimmicky to me, and using one in a watch isn’t particularly exclusive — meteorite dials appear in watches ranging from 3 to six digits. However, Czapek & Cie has always known how to give a meteorite enough character to make it very interesting. Two years go they did it with the Green Meteor. Now, they’re doing it with a Gibeon meteorite dial tinted a light, raw-denim blue, appearing in the Antarctique. There are two sizes, the 40.5mm Frozen Meteor limited to 38 and the 38.5mm Antarctique S Frozen Meteor limited to 25, both in steel on the new bracelet.

The case is the familiar Antarctique in stainless steel, 40.5mm wide and 10.3mm thick for the larger model, 38.5mm and the same 10.3mm thick for the S, with the brushed surfaces. The 40.5mm has a lug-to-lug of 44.5mm and the S comes in at 42.8mm. Both watches feature 120 meters of water resistance.

The dials are so cool. GT Cadrans near Lausanne cuts each disc from a slab of Gibeon octahedrite that fell in what is now Namibia roughly 600 million years ago, acid-washes and hand-polishes it to bring up the Widmanstätten lines, then lacquers it in successive layers and polishes it to that denim blue. The faceted trapezoid indexes and sword hands stay deliberately plain so the rock gets all the attention.

Inside is calibre SXH5, Czapek's first fully in-house movement, here since the Antarctique launched in 2020. It beats at 4Hz with a 60-hour reserve, and winds bidirectionally through an off-centre micro-rotor made out of recycled platinum. Seven skeletonised bridges, sandblasted black with straight-grained flanks and six hand-chamfered inward angles, give the movement a great look. The watches ship on the new V2 integrated steel bracelet, a tighter-tolerance reworking of the existing design with a redesigned thumb-operated quick-release clasp and a fully disassemblable construction that makes servicing far easier.

Both editions are priced at €27,500, with deliveries from September 2026. See more on the Czapek website.

5/

Greubel Forsey's Balancier Debuts Its New Qualité Musée Seal Of Incredible Finishings

Greubel Forsey built its name on multi-axis tourbillons housed in huge, lopsided cases bristling with bulges and viewing windows. They are very dramatic, very well made and very expensive. The Balancier, launched in 2017, was the first GF without a tourbillon, replacing it with a colossal 12.6mm balance wheel staged dial-side. The new Balancier QM is the latest addition to that family, and it introduces something new: Qualité Musée, an in-house certification requiring every micro-component to be finished to museum standard. GF has hand-finished its watches since 2004, and this takes it to a whole new level.

The case measures 39.6mm wide and 9.45mm thick, or 12.25mm with the high-domed sapphire over the dial and the matching one on the back. These are the same dimensions of the 2019 Balancier Contemporain, the brand's first sub-40mm watch. The case is made out of 18k white gold, with a hand-polished bezel and lugs and a grained caseband and caseback, the latter secured with white gold screws. For Greubel Forsey, this is restraint.

The dial is a familiar GF landscape: asymmetric, multi-tiered, drilled with deep circular wells and stacked with raised and suspended elements, all in hand-finished white gold. The two lowest wells hold the giant variable-inertia balance and a gold mainspring barrel engraved in relief with the brand name. Eccentric hours and minutes sit on a raised chapter ring to the right, with flame-blued steel hands, while a power reserve runs as a gold arc beneath that ring from 9 to 12 o'clock with a blued hand. A small seconds and a gold power reserve sub-dial fill out the 8 o'clock side. The finishing is world class. The balance bridge alone gets seven hand-finishing techniques, including black polishing, spotting, circular and straight graining, and bevelled edges, while the escape wheel is bevelled and polished on both faces, hidden side included.

Inside is the in-house GF09, a 298-part manual-winding movement with two series-coupled fast-rotating barrels feeding a 72-hour reserve, an in-house hairspring, and a stop-balance for accurate setting. Even the winding system on the frosted caseback is dressed up, with concave hand-polished sinks, bevelled teeth, and black-polished clicks and springs, and the engraved Qualité Musée plate is tucked out of sight inside the movement where almost no one will see it. It comes on a hand-sewn textured rubber strap with a white gold pin buckle.

The Balancier QM is a limited edition of 33, and the price is on request. See more on the Greubel Forsey 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

• A hospital phone rings, and a brother steps into a story that doesn’t make sense: a phantom fiancée, a drained bank account, a man who insists he’s been held captive. As fragments sharpen into something darker, disbelief gives way to dread. How did a search for companionship spiral into a crime no one wanted to see?

• In a police station in Bristol, an experiment began: hundreds of thousands of lives distilled into data points, risk scores, and unseen judgments. Officials promised foresight—an algorithmic glimpse of harm before it happened. But as the system spread, its logic blurred, its accuracy faltered, and its reach deepened into everyday life, shaping fates in ways few could see or challenge.

• A voice rises above the roar of stadiums, stretching a single word into something like myth. Andrés Cantor has spent decades turning goals into moments that echo far beyond the pitch, blending precision, preparation, and raw feeling. As the game grows and the stakes intensify, his calls reveal how thin the line can be between witness and participant.

👀Watch this

One video you have to watch today

Robert Eggers traffics in a kind of curated obscurity, dense, researched, and immaculately textured, that flatters the viewer into mistaking opacity for profundity. He appears smug, full of himself and, worst of all, assumes he’s not just more intelligent than his audience, but also more well read. I can’t stand him. And yet… This thing looks amazing.

Thanks for reading,
Vuk