The New IWC Ingenieur 35 Is Pool Ready; Bell & Ross Expands To Helicopters; A Bronze March LA.B Belza; Chronoswiss Doubles Down On Gold With; De Bethune Is All Stealthy With The DB28xs Dark Sand

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. Sorry for the late delivery, it’s getting tougher and tougher to write as the weather is better and better.

In this issue

• The New IWC Ingenieur 35 Is Summer And Pool Ready With An Aqua-Green Dial

• Bell & Ross Expands The Aviation Theme By Landing The BR-03 On A Helipad

• March LA.B Renders Its Twin-Fin Diver In Bronze With The Belza Twin

• Chronoswiss Doubles Down On Gold With A Frosted GMT And A Sunset Skeleton Chrono

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

👂What’s new

1/

The New IWC Ingenieur 35 Is Summer And Pool Ready With An Aqua-Green Dial

The Ingenieur has been on a good run since 2023, when IWC gave Gérald Genta's 1976 SL Jumbo the modern reworking it had been owed through a couple of decades of half-hearted remakes. They gave us a 35mm version in 2025 as the compact counterpart to the 40, and this new Pool dial is its sixth iteration. It exists mostly because summer sells aqua-green watches, and there's nothing wrong with that when the color is this good.

The case is 35mm wide and 9.4mm thick, water resistant to 100 meters, in steel. It keeps the alternating satin-brushed and polished finishing, with the vertically brushed surfaces and bright chamfers introduced in the recent design update. The round bezel with its five polished screws sits on the cushion-shaped case, and the integrated bracelet has polished central H-links against brushed outer links.

The dial is so good. Genta's grid pattern is stamped in negative relief, alternating vertical and horizontal blocks, now finished in a shade IWC calls Pool, an aqua-green that sits beautifully against steel. A snailed peripheral track rings the textured center and holds applied rhodium-plated indices filled with Super-LumiNova. The date at 3 o'clock gets a white disc with black numerals, the hands are lumed, and the lightning-bolt logo sits at 6 o'clock.

Behind the sapphire caseback is the calibre 47110, an automatic based on Cartier's 1847 MC, beating at 4Hz with a 42-hour power reserve, central hacking seconds and date. It's decorated with circular graining and Geneva stripes, and the gold-plated rotor is the standout. The bracelet is integrated steel, matching the case finishing.

The Ingenieur Automatic 35 Pool joins the permanent collection, which is fantastic, priced at €11,100. See more on the IWC website.

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Bell & Ross Expands The Aviation Theme By Landing The BR-03 On A Helipad

The BR-03 is perhaps one of the most recognizable watches in the industry. And for good reason, as it’s styled after a cockpit instrument, with an instantly known circle in a square look. And Bell & Ross has leaned into this in the best possible way, with dials inspired by radar, airspeed, artificial horizon, gyrocompass, and radiocompass instruments. Now, we’re getting the BR-03 Helipad, the first to leave fixed-wing aircraft behind and point at the rotorcraft world instead. This is cool.

The case is the familiar square in micro-blasted black ceramic, 41mm wide and long, with rounded corners and the functional corner screws that have defined the line since the start. A round bezel sits on top of the square, there’s a screw-down crown on the side, and the caseback is solid. Water resistance is 100 meters.

Working inward, the dial has a sloped flange that has the minute scale with the logo at noon, then a minute track rings a large disc outlined in yellow, with yellow markers and a big H at the center, the universal mark for a helipad. A helicopter silhouette sits on top, but it’s not a fixed thing: the nose points to the minutes, the rotor blades sweep as the running seconds, which is just incredibly cool. That yellow ring has a yellow marker that shows you the hours. Several elements glow green in the dark.

Inside is the calibre BR-Cal.327, a Sellita SW300-1 running at 4Hz with 54 hours of power reserve, the same movement that the rest of the collection uses. It comes on a bright yellow rubber strap with a black pin buckle, plus a second synthetic fabric strap with a Velcro-type closure.

The Bell & Ross BR-03 Helipad is limited to 500 and priced at €4,700. See more on the Bell & Ross website.

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March LA.B Renders Its Twin-Fin Diver In Bronze With The Belza Twin

March LA.B builds strange, but very satisfying watches. And most of them, even those that have dress intentions, are built to be in the water, with plenty of surfing references thrown about. The Belza line is named for a cliffside villa in Biarritz that overlooks the beach where European surfing got started, and this new pair of bronze Belza Twin watches gives a nod to twin-fin surfboards.

The case is 40mm wide and 14.35mm thick, made out of bronze, which will patina the way bronze always does, unevenly and to your taste or not. Water resistance climbs to 300 meters on these models. The crown sits at 4 o'clock and has on it the deep crisscross machining of the brand's M logo, a motif echoed on the wide unidirectional 120-click bezel, whose green or black ceramic insert has its engravings filled with bronze-toned paint. A box sapphire tops it off, and the steel screw-down caseback wears a relief of Villa Belza.

You get a choice between black or green dials, cut with horizontal waves. The rectangular indices are colour-matched to the bronze and filled with Super-LumiNova, as are the blunt hour and minute hands and the lollipop seconds hand. The flange track adds spherical lume plots, and the date at 3 o'clock has a black background with a green "3". The box crystal throws those pleasant optical distortions at the edges that you either love or hate.

Inside is the La Joux-Perret calibre G100, one of the stronger ETA 2824 alternatives on the market. It beats at 4Hz with a 68-hour power reserve. The watch comes on a green or black jacquard strap woven in France by Manufacture Julien Faure with a steel pin buckle, and a black silicone strap is included for the days you go swimming.

The March LA.B Belza Twin duo is available now, priced at $2,150. See more on the brand website.

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Chronoswiss Doubles Down On Gold With A Frosted GMT And A Sunset Skeleton Chrono

If I remember correctly, Chronoswiss has been known to do batch releases before. But I can’t very much remember them releasing two watches so radically different from each other before. One is the Pulse, the contemporary integrated-case line first released in 2025. The other is the Opus, the 1995 skeleton chronograph that basically defined the brand's identity and still gets a fresh coat every year. Both get a gold treatment, but the Pulse GMT Frosted Guilloché Gold leans luxe-sporty while the Opus Dakar Sundown is doing something warmer and more nostalgic.

Let’s start with the Pulse. The case is 41mm wide, 13mm thick, with a 46.27mm lug-to-lug, and it's made out of 18k 5N red gold. You get satin-brushed, sandblasted and polished surfaces across the case, the partially knurled bezel, and the recessed onion crown with weird looking, but cool, guards. Double anti-reflective sapphire on top, sapphire display back, and 50 meters of water resistance complete the externals. The dial is sensational: hand-guilloché centre and domed sections, frosted sandblasting, nickel galvanic coatings, blue-PVD applied indices and blued steel Pyramid hands over a frosted silver surface. The two blued screws in the middle make things quirkier and funner. The GMT layout remain unchanged, with local hours on a 12-hour subdial at 3 o'clock and home time on a 24-hour disc at 9 o'clock, central minutes and seconds tying them together. Inside is the calibre C.6002, built with La Joux-Perret, running at 4Hz with a 55-hour reserve and a skeletonised tungsten rotor. Unlike previous Pulse GMTs this one doesn’t have an integrated bracelet, instead a black rubber strap that makes it more sporty. The Chronoswiss Pulse GMT Frosted Guilloché Gold is limited to 50 pieces, priced at €46,500. See it here.

Then the Opus Dakar Sundown, which resembles last year's titanium Opus Dakar but swaps the lightweight case for a mix of stainless steel and 18k red gold. The 41mm case is 14.8mm thick and keeps everything Gerd-Rüdiger Lang drew up more than three decades ago: knurled bezel, oversized onion crown, pump pushers, straight lugs held by the Autobloc system. The satin-brushed steel case has a red gold bezel, crown, pushers and caseback ring, which makes it look considerably richer than the earlier Dakar. The skeletonised dial is finished in brown CVD tones meant to evoke desert sand at dusk, leaving the movement almost fully exposed with a 30-minute counter at 12, a 12-hour totaliser at 6, running seconds at 9 and a pointer date at 3. Powering it is the calibre C.741S, a heavily reworked automatic chronograph based on the Valjoux 7750, skeletonised with black galvanic bridges, perlage and a gold-plated Côtes de Genève rotor, beating at 4Hz with roughly 46 hours of reserve. It comes on a sand-coloured nubuck strap with a pin buckle. Price is set at €29,000. See more on the Chronoswiss website.

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De Bethune Is All Stealthy With The New DB28xs Dark Sand

De Bethune ha really made zirconium, a kind of niche material, its signature. And it’s watches like the new DB28xs Dark Sand that show off how good zirconium works with De Bethune’s futuristic approach. This is the Steel Wheels case reworked in matt anthracite zirconium, and the change of material changes everything about how the watch feels, completely swallowing up the light around it.

The case is 38.7mm wide and 8mm thick, which puts it firmly in the compact, wearable end of De Bethune's catalogue. The zirconium is hard, its oxidation stays stable in any conditions, and the black satin-brushed finish gives it a completely matt surface that looks more mineral than metal. The floating lugs, a patented system from 2006 that hinges at the center of the case, flex to the wrist and give it the weird spidery look that’s so cool. The crown sits at 12 o'clock. Water resistance is a modest 30 meters, which nobody buying this will test.

The dial is openworked in the De Bethune spirit. The base is black sandblasted titanium with a texture that’s supposed to look like volcanic sand, and the circular satin-finished hour ring has polished purple titanium markers that match the hands. The deltoid bridge across the center has a barleycorn guilloché with bevelled, sandblasted and polished edges, and it sits raised off the dial so it appears to float. The purple accents against all that anthracite are the only color, but it’s such a good choice.

Inside is the hand-wound calibre DB2115V13, running at 4Hz with a six-day power reserve from De Bethune's self-regulating twin barrel. The movement has a titanium balance wheel with white gold weights, a De Bethune balance spring with a flat terminal curve, silicon escape wheel, and triple pare-chute shock protection. The caseback has an anthracite microlight finish with a linear power reserve indicator in the same purple and gold tones. The watch comes on a leather-lined textile strap with a matching zirconium pin buckle.

The DB28xs Dark Sand is available now, limited by production capacities and priced at CHF 90,000 before taxes. See more on the De Bethune 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

• Competition among food trucks in Washington, D.C., is fierce—enough, it seems, that some competitors carry machetes and occasionally attack each other with screwdrivers. The district decriminalized unlicensed street vending a few years ago, and while that spares plenty of good-hearted vendors from punishment, it also means food-quality standards are dicey, prices are wildly inconsistent, and a few unnamed bosses are hell-bent on guarding their turf. Jessica Sidman explores it all, from the heavily fortified frozen dessert warehouses to the shell companies that mask food-truck ownership.

• Eve Livingston immerses herself in the world of David Armstrong, who calls himself “probably Scotland’s most prolific gold prospector” and belongs to a surprisingly devoted community of British gold panners. I had no idea that gold panning still happened in Britain, let alone that there was a British Gold Panning Association and a full calendar of competitions. Livingston doesn’t just uncover this subculture; she makes it sparkle, capturing the community’s camaraderie and the addictive thrill of spotting a glimmer in the pan. Pure gold.

• In this lovely, witty mix of travel writing and natural history, Helen Lewis travels to the Galápagos Islands to revisit Darwin’s time there during his voyage on the Beagle. Dispelling the usual myths, she is frank about the reality of his experience: the constant seasickness, the oppressive heat, and more than a little casual animal cruelty in the name of science. Although struggling with the climate herself, Lewis revels in the islands’ spectacular wildlife and the modern conservation efforts trying to protect this “laboratory of evolution” from tourism and invasive species. We also learn how, upon his return to England, Darwin never really ventured far again—his Beagle years leaving him with anxiety, a mysterious chronic illness, and, ahem… spectacular flatulence.

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Can’t wait to see this movie, it feels like the end of an era.

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Vuk