Timex Brings Back 38mm Seastar 1000 Chrono; Awake Introduces Sơn Mài Frosted Leaf; New Watches From UG and Chronoswiss

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. I’m glad to see the Monaco, my favorite Heuer, get some love. But the Micromilspec really knocked it out of the park with the backstory. We need more watches like this.

In this issue:

• Timex Brings Back The 38mm Seastar 1000 Chronograph In Time For Summer

• Awake Introduces Sơn Mài Frosted Leaf Collection With Earth Inspired Dials

• Union Glashütte Releases Another Silvretta Classic Race Belisar Chronograph

• Chronoswiss Is Back At It With The Super Colorful ReSec Snake Manufacture

👂What’s new

1/

Timex Brings Back The 38mm Seastar 1000 Chronograph In Time For Summer

OK, technically, the title is a bit misleading. Tissot has brought back the 38mm Seastar 1000 Chronograph a few months ago, but with today’s release it’s good to bundle it all up. What we have today is a new Seastar 1000 Chronograph in 38mm rose gold PVD-coated case and a striking turquoise dial, which now joins the other five models available.

Like the rest of the collection, this new Seastar 1000 Chronograph gets a stainless steel case that measures 38mm wide and 12.95mm thick, but it’s now covered in a rose gold PVD coating. But like the rest, it also has a brushed finish, with polished bevels. On top is a sapphire crystal, surrounded by a unidirectional rotating bezel featuring a turquoise mineral glass insert that has an engraved dive scale. Despite the fact that the pushers down’t screw in — the crown and caseback do — you still get a very respectable 300 meters of water resistance.

The dial is just as extravagant as the rose case. You get a fumé turquoise base that fades to a darker shade towards the edges. The dial keeps the classic tri-compax chronograph layout, including a 1/10th second counter at 2 o’clock, running seconds at 6 o’clock, and a 30-minute totalizer at 10 o’clock. A round date window with a white background is positioned at 4 o’clock. The applied hour markers have gilt surrounds, the hands are faceted, and both are filled with Super-LumiNova.

Inside, as hinted to with the position of the sub-dials, you’ll find a quartz movement, and it’s the Quartz Caliber G10.212. There’s not much to say about it. The watch comes on a turquoise rubber strap, but it should be noted that the lug width is 18mm.

The new Seastar 1000 Chronograph joins an existing lineup of 38mm models, including a black dial, a blackout edition, and a two tone on steel bracelets, as well as two on rubber straps which include a white dial and a blackout edition. This new rose gold PVD case and turquoise dial is priced at €595. See more on the Tissot website.

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Awake Introduces Sơn Mài Frosted Leaf Collection With Earth Inspired Dials

The French brand Awake has a great story. For years, they made limited edition watches. All of their releases were special projects that very often included collaborations, there were a lot of space-themed watches and all of them were pretty cool. Then, late last year, Awake introduced their first permanent collection called the Son Mài. It is a beautifully elegant watch that features incredible Vietnamese sanded lacquer dials. Now, we’re getting the new Sơn Mài “Frosted Leaf” Collection, which introduces a new technique: sanded lacquer and silver leaf gilding, combined with natural pigments

The case of the watch remains virtually unchanged, made out of recycled stainless steel, and measuring 39mm wide and 11.8mm thick, including the crystal. Without the crystal, the thickness drops down to 10.9mm. On top is a rounded bezel, surrounding the sapphire crystal, the side of the case is brushed, and you get polished surfaces on top of the lugs, with a wide polished chamfer stretching down the edge od the case. Water resistance is 50 meters.

The dials, if i haven’t mentioned, are inspired by our Earth, and you get three color options: blue, green and moka — all of which pay tribute to a part of out planet: oceans, forests and fertile lands. Now, on to what makes these dials different. The process lasts 15 hours and starts with sap from the Rhus Verniciflua tree in northern Vietnam, whose exceptionally brilliant natural lacquer forms the base of each dial. Master lacquerers first apply black pigments, followed by a layer of pure silver leaf, hand-sanded to reveal the initial textures. Next comes a veil of dark pigments, which is then, unconventionally covered with a second layer of silver, topped again by lighter pigments. This mille-feuille of materials is then finger-sanded to reveal the buried layers. That means that each dial is a bit different from the next. On top of that dial you get the signature hands and applied markers. However, instead of just painting them with lume, the hands and indices are made out of solid blocks of SuperLuminova BGW9, which is then capped with a faceted, polished steel overlay. That gives them both a backglow, which is just beautiful.

Inside is the La Joux-Perret G101 automatic movement, an alternative to the ubiquitous but increasingly hard to source ETA 2824, and the Sellita SW200. However, it has a much better power reserve than those two at 68 hours, and the same beat rate of 4Hz. The movement is decorated with Geneva stripes and a customised tungsten rotor. The watches come on a Delugs light grey tapering nubuck leather strap lined with rubber.

The new Awake Son Mai Frosted Leaf Collection is limited to 50 pieces per color and priced at €2,150, without taxes. See more on the Awake website.

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Union Glashütte Releases Another Silvretta Classic Race Belisar Chronograph

Just like Union Glashütte is not a hugely famous brand within the Swatch Group, so is the Silvretta Classic is not a hugely famous race. But just like the Silvretta is a wonderfully charming vintage car rally that has taken place in the Austrian and Swiss Alps since 1998, so are UG watches wonderfully charming. Union Glashütte has been a sponsor of the Silvretta for four years and for the fifth year now they are releasing the very, very good looking Belisar Chronograph Silvretta Classic 2025.

The case of the Belisar Chrono remains largely unchanged here, meaning you get a chunky watch that measures 44mm wide, 15.01mm thick and with an almost 53mm lug-to-lug measurement. You get retro piston-style pushers, a deeply cut crown, as well as vertically brushed surfaces with polished bevels. Water resistance is 100 meters.

But while the previous edition featured a somewhat classy copper-colored dial, this year, the dial has some pretty great colors. The base of the dial has a beige-grey color, with a slight green tint to it, perhaps. That’s contrasted with an orange-and-grey minutes ring divided into quarters. The grey sub-dials have a snailed finish with the 30-minute totaliser at 3 o’clock, 12 hour one at 6 — including a date aperture right there — and a running seconds at 9 o’clock. The very cool thing is the color of the hands: the running time ones get a black PVD coating with lume, while the other two sub-dials feature orange hands. This new version also has hour numerals printed onto it, and a printed logo in black.

Inside, no changes, and you once again get a modified Valjoux 7753 that UG calls the UNG-27.S1. It’s an automatic cam-operated chronograph with a silicon hairspring. It beats at 28,800vph and has a 65 hour power reserve. The movement can be seen through the back, where you’ll find the signed rotor, Glashütte ribbing on the plates and bridges and blued screws. You get three strap options — a three-link steel bracelet with brushed and polished links, a grey leather strap and a grey-and-orange textile NATO-style strap.

The new Union Glashütte Belisar Chronograph Silvretta Classic 2025 is limited to 200 pieces, numbered on the back, and priced at €3,450. See more on the Union Glashütte website.

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Chronoswiss Is Back At It With The Super Colorful ReSec Snake Manufacture

After a few more traditional releases — at least traditional for what they usually do — Chronoswiss is back at it what they do best. And what they do best are completely wild watches with incredible patterns, unique colors and a style that’s instantly recognizable from across the room. What we have here is the Chronoswiss ReSec Snake in its loudest color to date. And that’s saying a lot.

The colors start on the outside. The watch comes in a 42mm wide and 14.2mm thick case made out of titanium, that gets an iridescent PVD coating which shifts from dark green to turquoise as the light hits it. The case is fully round with a smooth midcase flanked by a knurled top and bottom case, long and thick lugs, and a huge onion-shaped crown on the right side. On top and bottom are sapphire crystal and water resistance is 100 meters.

Like so many Chronoswiss creations, this one also has a regulator display, which splits up the three time telling indications into their own segments — a central minutes hand, a hours sub-dial at noon and a very cool retrograde seconds in an arc spanning the dial from 4 to 8 o’clock. The base of the dial gets a hand-guilloché treatment, a staple for Chronoswiss, which here gets a bright green CVD coating. The hour disc is painted blue and has lumed indices, matching the suspended minutes ring on the periphery. The same blue is used for the seconds bridge, and the seconds are indicated by a bright orange hand.

All of this is powered by the automatic calibre C.6005, which is based on a La Joux-Perret movement. It beats at 4Hz and has a 55 hour power reserve. The movement’s bridges are decorated with radial Côtes de Genève and it’s wound with an openworked rotor. The watch comes on a white rubber strap.

The new Chronoswiss ReSec Snake Manufacture is limited to 100 pieces and priced at CHF 14,900. See more on the Chronoswiss website.

⏲️Wait a minute

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

• Russia’s intelligence services turned Brazil into an assembly line for deep-cover operatives. A team of federal agents from the South American country has been quietly dismantling it.

• This is an excerpt from the book The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future. It explains how Peter Thiel’s relationship with Eliezer Yudkowsky launched the AI revolution and how the AI doomer and the AI boomer both created each other's monsters.

• An arson attack in Colorado had detectives stumped, untill they found the Google searches of three young boys. The way they solved the case could put everyone at risk.

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Thanks for reading,
Vuk