Timex Marlins In Red, White, And Blue For The 250th; Zenith's Paris Themed El Primero; A Spaceship Black Citizen Recrystallised Titanium; A Blue Parmigiani Ultra-Cermet; ArtyA Pushes Things Further

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. Politically, the 250th anniversary of the US is not the most cheerful of things anywhere in the world, but these anniversary watches (and there are more of them I will write about) are nice.

In this issue

• Timex Does The Marlin Collection In Red, White, And Blue For The Semiquincentennial

• Zenith Revisits Paris, This Time On The El Primero, With A Copper-Roof Green Inspired Chronomaster

• The Citizen Attesa Spaceship Black In Recrystallised Titanium Gives Us The World's Fastest Satellite Sync

• Parmigiani Fleurier Gives The Ultra-Cermet Chronograph A Really Cool Blue Variant

• ArtyA Pushes Things Further With A Sapphire-Cased Tourbillon You Can Change The Color Of

👂What’s new

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Timex Does The Marlin Collection In Red, White, And Blue For The Semiquincentennial

Despite it being a bit of a rocky one, Timex is marking America's 250th birthday the way you'd expect a brand with this much history to do it: by taking their vintage-inspired Marlin line and giving two watches, an automatic and a quartz, a subtle red-white-and-blue colorway.

Starting with the Marlin Jet Automatic America 250, capped at 500 numbered examples. The case is 38mm wide and 10.5mm thick in stainless steel, mostly brushed, with a grooved bezel and a domed Hesalite crystal sitting on top. Despite it being subtle, red turns up everywhere once you start looking: the bezel ring, the crown cap at 3 o'clock, even the ring around the exhibition caseback. It has 50 meters of water resistance, which is fine. The smaller Marlin America 250 comes in a polished 34mm case, 9.5mm thick, with a domed acrylic crystal, a recessed crown, a closed back, and a lesser 30 meter water resistance.

Both dials run the red, white, and blue theme. The Jet gets a white dial with a classic crosshair, applied blue baton markers, a date at 3 o'clock, and a red central seconds hand cutting across it, with the America 250 logo at 6. The quartz model leans a bit dressier, with a silver-white dial with blue Arabic numerals mixed into baton markers, an inverted triangle at 12, dauphine hands, and a railway minute track around the edge. Same red seconds hand, same anniversary logo above 6.

The Jet uses the Miyota 8215, an automatic beating at 3 Hz with 21 jewels and roughly 42 hours of reserve. Fairly unglamorous, but does the job. It comes on a blue woven Perlon strap with a steel pin buckle. The Marlin America 250 is quartz, paired with a blue croc-grain leather strap and a steel pin buckle.

The Marlin Jet Automatic America 250 is priced at €319, limited to 500 pieces. The Marlin America 250 joins the permanent collection at €149. Both are available now on the Timex website here and here.

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Zenith Revisits Paris, This Time On The El Primero, With A Copper-Roof Green Inspired Chronomaster

Zenith used Paris for inspiration once already. In 2024 it was the Defy Skyline, all sharp angles and modern glass. This time the brand reached for the El Primero instead, and the result might be more fitting. The Chronomaster Original Paris Edition takes its cue from the verdigris copper that coats Parisian roofs and domes once the rain has had a few decades with it. I’ve been in love with Paris since I first visited almost 30 years ago, so I really wouldn’t mind owning this.

The case is the familiar Chronomaster Original, which means it’s made out of stainless steel and 38mm wide, 12.9mm thick. You get the pump pushers, the tapered lugs, the box sapphire crystal that gives it a vintage profile. The caseback is sapphire too, engraved with "ÉDITION PARIS" and your number out of 50. It's a small watch by modern standards of chronographs and it’s a very nice choice. Water resistance is 50 meters.

The dial is the novelty and where the Paris inspiration can be found. Zenith finished it in a gradient verdigris, darker at the rim and fading lighter toward the centre. Against a steel case it looks fantastic, and the overlapping sub-dials are done in white to not interfere too much. Rhodium-plated faceted markers and hands are filled with Super-LumiNova, and the date sits at 4:30.

Inside is the El Primero 3600, an automatic chronograph beating at 5 Hz and measuring to a tenth of a second, its central hand sweeping a full lap every 10 seconds. It comes on a steel bracelet fitted with Zenith's new Zenclasp, which adjusts in 2.5mm steps under a flip-up cover and uses ceramic ball detents to lock cleanly. A black nubuck strap comes in the box as an alternative.

The Zenith Chronomaster Original Paris Edition is limited to 50, priced at €11,800, and sold only in France. See it on the French Zenith website.

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The Citizen Attesa Spaceship Black In Recrystallised Titanium Gives Us The World's Fastest Satellite Sync

The Attesa line is where Citizen keeps its serious tool watches, and the CC4107-80H is the new flagship of the collection. This is a limited run of 1,800 watches, powered by GPS satellite syncing and a movement that does almost everything, packed into a very cool titanium case. The fact that it’s such a nice watch makes it kind of strange that Citizen quietly listed this one on its Taiwan site with a July global release in mind. They should be talking about it more.

The case is 43.2mm of Super Titanium, Citizen's hardened titanium alloy that helps the large watch and resists scratches better than the steel most brands use at this price. But it’s not just ordinary Super Titanium, it has a recrystallised titanium surface. Citizen heats the metal and runs it through an industrial cooling process, which forces crystal patterns to bloom across the surface, so no two cases share the same marbling. It is a clever way to make an all-black tool watch feel like more than a coat of paint. Here, those crystals show up on the bezel and the bracelet mid-links.

The "Spaceship Black" dial keeps the mood dark and technical, which suits a watch this size and this busy. You get world time, a chronograph, perpetual calendar, alarm, and a power reserve indicator crammed onto the face, so it’s not the easiest thing to read.

Inside is the F950, Citizen's most advanced Eco-Drive Satellite Wave GPS calibre. It claims the fastest satellite reception in the world at three seconds, syncs across 39 time zones, and never needs a battery change thanks to light charging. The watch comes on a matching titanium bracelet.

The Citizen Attesa CC4107-80H Satellite Wave GPS "Spaceship Black" is limited to 1,800 unnumbered watches, priced at $2,495. See more on the Citizen website.

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Parmigiani Fleurier Gives The Ultra-Cermet Chronograph A Really Cool Blue Variant

It’s been almost exactly a year since Parmigiani Fleurier introduced the Tonda PF Sport Chronograph in Ultra-Cermet. A cermet is a composite material consisting of ceramic (cer) and metallic (met) materials and Parmigiani claimed they were the first watchmaker to craft a complete case in Cermet, from the case middle to the pusher. Now, a year later, they’re adding a third colorway to the collection, the Mineral Blue. And it just might be my favorite of the bunch.

The case is 42.5mm wide and 13.3mm thick, with the middle case, the fluted bezel, the screw-down crown and the chronograph pushers all machined from Ultra-Cermet. The material is a ceramic and titanium hybrid, roughly 40% titanium, which gets you ceramic-level scratch resistance at around 1,450 Vickers while keeping the feel and look of a metal. Parmigiani mixes satin-brushed and polished finishes, which is just cool. Water resistance is 100 meters.

The dial is treated in Blackor, a black gold-nickel deposit, and paired with Mineral Blue subdials. The 30-minute and 12-hour counters sit at 3 and 9, with running seconds at 6. Indices are hand-applied Blackor-plated 18k gold with a touch of lume, and the skeletonised gold hour and minute hands get lume too, while the steel chronograph and small-seconds hands have none.

Inside is the calibre PF070, developed with sister company Vaucher, an integrated automatic chronograph with a column wheel and vertical clutch. It runs at 5Hz, has a 65 hour power reserve, and it’s COSC certified. Through the sapphire back you can see the openworked satin bridges with hand-bevelled edges and a skeletonised 22k rose gold rotor. It comes on a matching Mineral Blue textured rubber strap with an Ultra-Cermet pin buckle.

The Parmigiani Fleurier Tonda PF Sport Chronograph Ultra-Cermet Mineral Blue joins the permanent collection at CHF 40,400, without tax. See more on the Parmigiani website.

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ArtyA Pushes Things Further With A Sapphire-Cased Tourbillon You Can Change The Color Of

ArtyA has never been a brand for people who want to blend in. These have always been expressive and a bit over the top, with its weird case and transparent sapphire-cased flying tourbillons. Now, they’re releasing the Purity Tourbillon Sport Edition, still a transparent sapphire-cased flying tourbillon, but now with the option to pick a color for the sapphire. One that you can change later. That’s cool.

The case is the same from the Wavy collection, 44mm wide and carved entirely from sapphire, with curved surfaces that distort and reveal the movement depending on the angle you hold it. A sapphire crown and a screwed sapphire caseback complete the all-transparent construction, which is really impressive. Machining sapphire into compound curves like this is extremely difficult. Equally impressive is that you could bring this watch within 10 meters of water, let alone 30 meters of water resistance.

There is no dial. The movement is the dial, laid out asymmetrically with the oversized 18mm flying tourbillon on the left and the twin barrels fully exposed on the right. Central sword-shaped hands tell the time against a laser-engraved chapter ring, and the Sport Edition adds a central seconds hand the earlier versions lacked. The color comes from the caseback gaskets, offered at launch in Deep Red, Luminous Orange, Electric Turquoise and Deep Blue. You choose one when you order, and an ArtyA retailer can swap it later if you want a different look. It’s wild how much color those gaskets bring in.

Inside is the calibre PUR-T1, an ArtyA manufacture movement developed with Telos, fully skeletonized with two parallel barrels feeding the tourbillon. It beats at 4 Hz with a 70-hour power reserve, and the finishing includes hand-polished bevels on the skeletonized bridges and engraving on the barrels. The watch comes on a strap matched to your chosen gasket color, also swappable through authorized retailers.

The ArtyA Purity Tourbillon Sport Edition is limited to nine pieces per color, priced at CHF 130,000. It is absurd, expensive, and completely committed to being itself. Love it. See more on the ArtyA 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

• We know a lot about crows, but we’ll never truly know what these smart creatures think about us. Do they continue to visit us because they view us as friends, or have they simply trained us to give them peanuts every day? For Audubon magazine, Elizabeth Preston explores the delightful world of corvids, offering insight into crow behavior and corvid-human relations.

• Steven Blum monitors his 86-year-old father from 5,000 miles away using Sensi, an AI device that tracks and listens to everything inside his father’s home. “His coughs, toilet flushes, and even snippets of private conversations—Sensi records it all,” Blum writes. While he seeks his father’s consent for this level of surveillance, the piece asks overall whether an 86-year-old can truly grasp what they’re agreeing to. As families increasingly turn to AI to help aging parents stay in their homes, not everyone will surrender their privacy for safety. Blum’s story is part of Architectural Digest’s “Future of Home” series, in partnership with Wired. This is so incredibly dystopian.

• Alfred Jung Lee has been many things. A journalist. A horticulturist. A husband. He’s no longer any of these things. He’s now other things, though. Things that he wasn’t before. Most notably, a widower. How he fits these pieces together—tucking some away, while revealing others, sparely but no less affectingly—makes for a remarkable puzzle box of an essay, one where description serves as both designation and disclosure.

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My Kindle is on its way out and I’m tempted to buy one of these micro e-readers. People stick them to their phones and catch up on reading instead of browsing Instagram. Does anyone here have one to tell me more?

Thanks for reading,
Vuk