The New Moonshine Gold MoonSwatch Is The Coolest One To Date; Bell & Ross' Northern Ligts BR-03 GMT; Unimatic Brings Clay To The Modello Uno And Due; An Armin Strom In Red; A Wild Krayon

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. You might have noticed that there was no newsletter on Friday. Like I said, this weekend my wife Ana turned 40 and we threw her a party on Friday. Not only was it the most epic party of all time (no joke, a generational party), it wrecked me for two whole days so my plan to email you on Saturday did not pan out. Anyways, making up for lost time now.

In this issue

• The MoonSwatch Mission To The Moon 1969 Charges 1969 Gold Prices For Real Moonshine Gold

• Bell & Ross Sends The BR-03 GMT Into The Northern Lights With A Green Lume

• Unimatic Brings Clay Court Season to Four References Versions Of The Modello Uno And Modello Due

• The Very Cool Armin Strom Mirrored Force Resonance Gets A Red Dial

• Krayon's Anywhere Parhelion Wraps A Sunrise Complication In A Sapphire Gradient

👂What’s new

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The MoonSwatch Mission To The Moon 1969 Charges 1969 Gold Prices For Real Moonshine Gold

The MoonSwatch has reached the point where almost every new variation gets a collective sigh as much as a cheer, and the jokes about Swatch never letting the concept rest have started to write itself. This one, however, is something else. I’m deeply in love with it and I hate that I can’t help myself. The new Swatch Mission To The Moon 1969 MoonSwatch is chock full of references. First, it launched a few days ago, July 16 at 15:32 CEST, the exact minute the Saturn V lifted off in 1969. BUt even better than that, Swatch melted down gold from Omega spare parts in its own foundry, turned it into 18K Moonshine Gold, put 11 grams of it into the watch, and is now charging you what 11 grams of gold cost in 1969. That was CHF 48. That’s cool.

The case is the familiar Bioceramic MoonSwatch shell, same dimensions as every other one, now done in black, with a gold-printed tachymeter on the bezel under an antireflective coating. The crown and pushers are solid 18K Moonshine Gold. Each case is individually numbered x/1969 on the left flank, the same way Omega numbered the 1994 Apollo 11 editions. The battery cover on the back carries a gold Moon complete with a boot print, plus the landing date and "Mission To The Moon" in gold.

The dial is made out of Moonshine Gold, Omega's proprietary alloy, paler than standard yellow gold and vertically brushed. It also uses the same handset as the 2019 Apollo 11: black-filled gold hours and minutes with a black central chronograph hand, black sub-dial hands. There's also an Au750 hallmark engraved on the dial.

The movement is the standard MoonSwatch quartz, unchanged, no earthrise or moonphase here. The strap is black rubber with gold Swatch, Omega, and MoonSwatch logos printed on it and a gold lining, which seems to have a moon-like texture.

This just might be the coolest MoonSwatch to date, which, of course, means you won’t be able to get one. Swatch will require you to fill out an ESTA form on their website between July 16th at 15:32 CEST and July 21st at 23:59 CEST, and Swatch then picks 1,969 applicants who then get instructions to collect the watch from a boutique. As you might have guessed, the watch is limited to 1,969 pieces, and priced at CHF 500. See more on the Swatch website.

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Bell & Ross Sends The BR-03 GMT Into The Northern Lights With A Green Lume

When they’re not focusing on recreating airplane instruments on your wrist or playing around with kind of kitschy aviation references, Bell & Ross is really good at using lume. That’s why they have the Lum series, which is a very nice playground for them. The latest addition is the BR-03 GMT Green Lum, a limited run of the 2021-generation GMT with a gradient dial meant to look like aurora borealis through a cockpit window. I’m digging it.

The case is the familiar rounded square, 42mm wide and 11.3mm thick, water-resistant to 100 meters with a sapphire crystal on top. The four exposed screws at the corners are still there. Finishing includes brushed surfaces, wide polished bevels along the edges. The bidirectional 24-hour bezel gets a new black polished ceramic insert with all markings in green-glwing C3.

The dial has a vertical gradient from green at the bottom to black at the at. Numerals, markers and hands are all coated in pale green C3. The handset is blackened here instead of polished steel, suiting the nighttime flying theme. The seconds hand still has a little aeroplane counterweight, and the GMT hand is an openworked triangle.

Inside is the BR-CAL.303, a Sellita SW330-2 which beats at 4Hz, with a 54-hour power reserve. It's a caller-style GMT, so you independently adjust the central 24-hour hand. Fine for tracking a second zone from your desk, less useful if you actually fly for a living. It comes on a black rubber strap with a black synthetic fabric strap in the box.

The Bell & Ross BR-03 GMT Green Lum is limited to 500, priced at €4,900. See more on the Bell & Ross website.

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Unimatic Brings Clay Court Season to Four References Versions Of The Modello Uno And Modello Due

UNIMATIC has built its whole identity on restraint, and they show the same amount of it when they do collaborations. Which is a good thing, of course. And it’s very evident in this new tennis-themed capsule collection, which subtly hints at the sports it’s paying homage to. The Tennis Collection applies to four references across the Modello Uno diver and Modello Due field platforms, all sharing a clay-court red dial with matte white detailing.

The Modello Uno references use the familiar sandblasted 316L steel case at 41.5mm wide including the bezel, 13.2mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 49mm, a 120-click mono-directional bezel with matte black aluminum insert, and the screw-down crown which has the Alchemical Sun engraving. The Modello Due drops to 38mm with a lug-to-lug of 47.5mm, a thickness of 12.7mm and the fixed monoblock bezel. Both get sapphire crystals with inner AR coating and 300 meters of water resistance, and both have a tennis ball motif on the screw-down caseback.

The dial is the most obvious connection with the sport. You get a clay red base, matte white open seconds rails and trims, and Super-LumiNova C1 throughout. The seconds hand gets a dark yellow luminous tip, which is an obvious reference to a tennis ball.

The GMT references have the Seiko NH34 A with hacking seconds and a 24-hour hand; the standard references use the NH35 A. Power reserve is over 41 hours on all four. Straps are black two-piece nylon with a safety-yellow three-layer keeper and sandblasted UNIMATIC-signed hardware.

Each reference is limited to 99 individually numbered examples. Pricing is as such: $745 for the U1-TSP, $860 for the U1-GMT-TSP, $630 for the U2-TSP, and $790 for the U2-GMT-TSP. See more on the Unimatic Website.

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The Very Cool Armin Strom Mirrored Force Resonance Gets A Red Dial

The Armin Strom Mirrored Force Resonance hasn’t changed all that much since the brand redesigned it in 2022, so you always get the two balance wheels, two escapements, one movement, linked so they fall into sync with each other. But why would you change something that’s so good. What you want to do with it is iterate. That’s why we’ve already seen the watch in green, ice blue, rose gold, ruby, and a Zeitgeist anniversary edition. Now, we’re getting a red version.

The watch comes in a stainless steel case that measures 43mm wide, 11.5mm thick, with a 49.60mm lug-to-lug. The case has polished tops of lugs, beautiful polished facets and a polished plain fixed bezel, while the sides of the watch have a vertically brushed finish. On top is a box-shaped sapphire crystal that extends all the way to the edges, while out back is a flat sapphire crystal. Water resistance is 30 meters.

The dial keeps the same setup with the offset dial for the hours and minutes and the resonance mechanism, two balance wheels oscillating in opposite directions, connected by Armin Strom’s patented resonance clutch spring on the left side of the dial. On the right side of the dial is a smaller time dial that’s now hand-guilloché cut on a rose-engine lathe and finished in a deep red. Black azuré chapter rings surround the twin seconds registers, and the off-centre hours and minutes sit under faceted applied markers that float above the guilloché.

Visible from front and back is the manually wound Caliber ARF21, which beats at 3.5Hz and has a 48 hour power reserve. It has two independent oscillators, each equipped with its own balance wheel and hairspring, synchronized via the brand’s patented clutch spring. To show this off, the movement has twin seconds counters, which can be reset with the pusher at 2. You will then get to witness them synchronize once again. The watch comes on a grey Alcantara strap with red and white stitching.

The new Armin Strom Mirrored Force Resonance Ruby is limited to fifteen pieces and priced at CHF 76,000. See more on the Armin Strom website.

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Krayon's Anywhere Parhelion Wraps A Sunrise Complication In A Sapphire Gradient

A couple of years ago, Krayon founder Rémi Maillat went to Greenland with photographer Fei Hou and saw a parhelion, the optical effect where sunlight refracting through ice crystals in cold high clouds throws bright false suns alongside the real one. And when you’re a founder of a brand like Krayon, an experience like that can be funneled to a number of different results. This experience, the one of seing the parhelion, results in the Krayon Anywhere Parhelion, a CHF 430,000 sapphire studded watch based on an absolute legend.

The case remains pretty much unchanged in dimensions at 42mm wide and 9.5mm thick, now in white 18k gold. Overall this is pretty restrained watch. At least the original Anywhere is, despite the slightly large dimensions. This variant, however, is not restrained.

Sapphire front and back, 30 meters of water resistance. Restrained proportions, then 124 baguette-cut sapphires running across the bezel, case middle, lugs and crown side, plus 35 more on the buckle. The stones grade from white through pale blue into midnight blue, and Krayon says finding stones that would step cleanly through that gradient took close to a year. At 12 o'clock sits a single white sapphire cut into a Y shape echoing the brand logo, a new shape Krayon calls the Krayon Cut, standing in for the brightest point of the parhelion.

The dial centre is mother-of-pearl, picked because it never sits still in the light. Eleven diamond hour markers use the same Krayon Cut and are invisibly set so they read as floating. Around the outside are the sunrise and sunset indications, the rotating 24-hour scale, and the date at 6 o'clock, with MIDDAY, MIDNIGHT, SIX AM and SIX PM in Krayon's own typography. The mother-of-pearl and the diamonds work together better than a description suggests; the dial genuinely looks like water under ice.

Nothing changed underneath. The hand-wound manufacture calibre C030 carries over, 432 components, 55 jewels, 3Hz, 72-hour power reserve. Location setting is done by Krayon rather than the owner, so if you move, the watch goes back to Geneva for recalibration. It comes on a dark blue alligator strap with a white gold pin buckle carrying the same graduated sapphire setting as the case.

The Anywhere Parhelion is not limited and costs CHF 430,000. More at krayon.ch.

⏲️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

• For The Dial, Ariel Delgado Dixon recalls her time spent in what she calls The Service, an exclusive underground marijuana operation that ran in New York City. Dixon spent her time walking the Boss’s dog, a “barrel-chested mutt” called Scarface who had a penchant for pooping in the middle of traffic. Here, she recounts the Boss’s larger-than-life presence as a weed kingpin.

• In an excerpt from his book, Our Wild Familiars: How Animals Are Adapting to Cities and Reshaping the Natural World, Dan Werb makes the case that raccoons—brushed off by most people as pests—are intelligent and adaptable animals. Werb shows how raccoons thrive in cities like Toronto, learning and unlearning habits as they navigate different microenvironments. A delightful read, full of Werb’s eye for scene and character.

• There’s been plenty of coverage on the Weeki Wachee mermaids in recent years, and Jack Burke isn’t trying to break any new ground here. But he does manage to bring to life the weird underground theatre where the mermaids have danced for decades, beautifully evoking the wonder of celestial blue light and sparkly tails. Burke’s piece is a gentle homage to “this weird little relic from another age”—a time in America that belonged to the hustlers and the dreamers.

👀Watch this

One video you have to watch today

I did not like this car when it came out. I still think it’s pretty ugly. But listen to that thing.

Thanks for reading,
Vuk