Seiko's Marinemaster Goes Green, Spinnaker Welcomes Ghost Season; And New Watches From RZE, Ralph Lauren, And MB&F

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👂What’s new

1/ Seiko Turns the New Marinemaster Green for Its Latest Save the Ocean Edition

The Marinemaster is Seiko’s top mechanical dive watch, and the current generation is only six months old. Seiko had already redesigned it two years earlier, so the March update came faster than anyone expected. It kept the 1968 design and the 42.6mm case and changed four things: a ceramic bezel insert, the date moved to 3:00, a tool-free micro-adjusting clasp, and the calibre 8L45. Those changes made it the best diver Seiko sells, if that's what floats your boat. The HBF003 is the first special edition built on that version, with a green sunray dial in place of the black grained one and it's part of Seiko's Save the Ocean effort that funds multiple ocean preservation and exploration efforts.

The steel case is unchanged from the standard HBF001. That means that it's made out of stainless steel and measures 42.6mm wide, a massive 14.1mm thick and has a lug-to-lug of 49.3mm. I know this is a dive watch that's actually intended to be used as a tool, but that thickness is hard to justify. On top is a double domed sapphire crystal, surrounded by a unidirectional bezel that has a black ceramic insert with the classic 60 minute scale. The caseback is engraved “Limited Edition” with the individual number, the only physical sign on the case that this isn’t the regular model. Water resistance is 300 meters.

Seiko claims that the green of the dial is inspired by mangrove forests, the coastal trees that grow between the sea and fresh water and protect shorelines from erosion, and it goes from near-black to bright green depending on the light. The seconds hand is pink gold-tone. Everything else on the dial matches the HBF001, including the date at 3:00.

The calibre 8L45 is an automatic movement based on the Grand Seiko 9S65 architecture, and it beats at 4Hz, with a 72-hour power reserve, and a rated accuracy of +10 to -5 seconds per day. The steel bracelet’s clasp adjusts by 16mm in eight 2mm steps without tools.

The Seiko Prospex Marinemaster 1968 Heritage Save the Ocean Limited Edition HBF003 is limited to 900 pieces. As for pricing, it's only been published on the UK website for now, even though the watch will be available worldwide, and it's set at £3,300 or about €3,900. That's a lot of money. See more photos here and the watch on the Seiko website.

2/ Spinnaker And seconde/seconde/ Bring Back All 50 Phantoms For Year Four

Every October since 2023, Spinnaker and seconde/seconde/ have put out a Halloween watch. The first one, the Fleuss Automatic 50 Phantoms, was a parody of the Blancpain Fifty Fathoms with 50 lumed ghosts on the dial and “No Feet” printed at 6 o’clock. It was limited to 670 examples at $445 and sold out almost immediately. That was the year Romaric André, the banker-turned-customizer behind seconde/seconde/, was releasing a new collaboration nearly every week, and I was getting pretty tired of all the collabs coming out. The Spinnaker was the one watched that made me completely change my mind on him. It was fantastic. The 2024 follow-up gave us the Phantom Classic and the No App, which moved the ghosts onto the bezel as a nod to Blancpain’s No Rad, and hid the date so you could only see it under UV light. Last year the two dropped the Blancpain joke for the 47+3 Phantoms, with three ghosts hidden on the case and the rotor and a wavy bezel I liked more than I expected to. This year the 50 Phantoms name is back, the wavy bezel remains, and you get two variants, the Crazy and the Quiet.

The case is the familiar Fleuss at 40mm wide and the two variants come in at two different thicknesses – the Crazy is 12.15mm thick and the Quiet comes in a bit thinner at 11.8mm, and you'll see later why. The bezel is now white ceramic, polished, with the same rippled edge as last year, which is supposed to be the hem of a bedsheet ghost. Around back, two oval display windows turn the caseback into a pair of ghost eyes. And they light up at night. You get a sapphire crystal on top, a screw-down crown and 100 meters of water resistance, down from 150 meters last year.

The difference between the two watches is all on the layered dial. The Crazy edition prints its 50 ghosts in green, yellow, blue and white, so you see all of them in daylight, and they’re lumed for the dark. On the Quiet edition, during daylight you only see the ghost eyes scattered around the dial. The full ghosts never appear, but the eyes do glow in the dark. Love that thing.

Inside is a Miyota 9039 automatic, which beats at 4Hz with a 42-hour power reserve. Both versions come on a jubilee-style steel bracelet, plus a white perforated rubber strap and an orange striped fabric strap in the box. Btw, the box is pretty cool, with a glass display case for the watch and a UV torch to light up the ghosts even in daylight.

The Quiet edition is limited to 850 examples and the Crazy to 1,500, both priced at $600. The watches go on sale 16th October, 6:30 am CEST, and if previous editions are anything to use as a baseline, these will go very fast. See more photos here and the watches on the Spinnaker website.

3/ RZE Builds Its Own In-House Digital Module and Will Swap It Into Your UTD-8000

Digital watches usually die with their electronics. When the module gets old, the whole watch goes in a drawer, especially on a lower priced digital watch. Often, a replacement module will cost a hair less than a brand new watch, so why not go for a new watch. This is, of course, a bit wasteful and one of the reasons why some people don't like quartz/digital watches. RZE, the Singapore brand that makes lightweight titanium field and dive watches, agrees that this is wasteful, so they have a solution. And it's not a simple one, as it required them to develop their own in-house digital module. When's the last time you heard a watch brand do that? And the UDT digital watches going forward will all use this module. But what about you UDT-8000 owners? No biggie, for $100 RZE will sell you the new UTD-8080 movement to drop into your existing case. Very cool.

The case is Grade 2 titanium with RZE’s UltraHex surface treatment. It is 42mm wide with a bezel that overhangs to 43mm, 13.4mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 49.5mm, and it weighs 51.9 grams. Water resistance is 200 meters. A sapphire crystal with Super AR coating on the inside covers the display. The launch model, the UTD-8080-ST, gets a white Cerakote finish with black accents.

The display moves to FSTN LCD, which has darker numerals and better legibility at steeper angles than the standard TN screens most digitals use. Functions now include dual time, multiple alarms, a countdown timer, a 1/100th-second stopwatch and a calendar that runs to 2099 without adjustment. The backlight is RZE’s UltraGlow.

The UTD-8000 ran on a modified existing module. The RZE-8080 is RZE’s own design, tested on the UTD platform since March 2025 for temperature extremes, shock, vibration and drops of more than 30 feet. It runs on a CR2032 cell rated for at least three years. RZE also plans to offer the module to other independent brands and microbrands, which could be extremely cool.

The UTD-8080-ST is priced at $399 and ships in November 2026. Standard UltraHex titanium versions follow in March 2027, priced at $299. The $100 swap for UTD-8000 owners will be available through service centers in the US, Canada, the UK and Singapore from January 2027, and RZE covers the shipping back to you. See more photos here and the watch on the RZE website.

4/ Ralph Lauren Shrinks the Western Cushion to 38mm And It's Still The Coolest Watch

Ralph Lauren’s Western collection is the part of its watch line that looks least like what you would expect from a watch, and at the same time most like something Ralph Lauren would make. The cases are sterling silver, engraved in the style of Western belt buckles and saddle silver, and they come from the same ranchwear world as the brand’s Double RL clothing. RL watches are often looked down on as being fashion watches, but they are so much more than that. They started making watches in 2009 through a joint venture with Richemont, featuring some pretty nice movements and even better finishing. Since, they've moved production in-house and often come out with wild creations like this Western Cushion. This is certainly not a watch for everybody. I love it.

The case measures 38mm square and 9.3mm thick, with a lug width of 23mm, which are some killer proportions. Well, killer, except for that lug width, but would you dare put a boring strap from your collection on a watch like this? Nah, this needs a custom made leather masterpiece if you want an alternative to the one that comes with the watch. It also has what look like super stubby lugs, likely making it very wearable for most people. It’s made out of sterling silver, which is a rare material in watchmaking, but one that will patina brilliantly. The case is then engraved with scrollwork and aged so the engraving are darker than the surface. About 47 grams of silver are used for the case. There’s also a convex sapphire crystal on top with anti-reflective coating on the inside, a back closed with six screws, and 50 meters of water resistance. The crown is aged silver with the RL logo.

There are three dial options, two of which are lacquer. The off-white version has printed black numerals, Roman and Arabic mixed, with a black minute track. The black version swaps in off-white numerals but keeps the black Breguet hands, so it will be the hardest of the three to read. The third dial is polished natural turquoise and it is by far the best of the three.

Inside is the RL514, an automatic Piaget makes exclusively for Ralph Lauren. It’s an 11-ligne calibre with 26 jewels and 189 components, beating at 3Hz with about 40 hours of power reserve, finished with vertical Côtes de Genève and perlage. The off-white and turquoise models come on brown tooled calfskin, the black model on black, all with brown lining and an engraved silver pin buckle. The strap tapers to 20mm and is interchangeable.

The Ralph Lauren Western Cushion 38mm in sterling silver is available now, priced at €26,000 with the off-white or black dial and €29,000 with the turquoise dial. See more photos here and the watches on the Ralph Lauren website. Unfortunately, the RL website is extremely geolimited so I can't link to the watches directly as it will only allow me to see the Croatian website. I believe if you click on the link above it should bring you to your local store that has the watches.

5/ MB&F Revives the Original Legacy Machine as the Smaller, Tougher LM1 EVO

The Legacy Machine 1 was never a watch you’d wear to do anything. It's the kind of thing I would put on and just stare at. It truly is one of the most impressive watches I've ever seen up close. The watch was released in 2011 among the brand’s spaceship-shaped Horological Machines with two white sub-dials, Roman numerals and a giant balance wheel floating on a bridge above them, like a 19th-century pocket watch that had wandered into the wrong decade. MB&F retired it in 2017, but obviously not forever. Now it’s back in EVO spec, the sport-ready version (titanium, rubber, shock protection, real water resistance) that the brand has been rolling across the Legacy line since the LM Perpetual. Of all the Legacy Machines, the first one deserved this the most.

The case, made in either grade 5 titanium or 18k rose gold, shrinks from 44mm to 42mm wide and is 16.8mm thick, though that number includes the domed sapphire on top and the box sapphire underneath. Add to that a lug-to-lug of 52mm and the watch certainly has a huge presence on wrist, but not in a bad way. You want a watch like this to have a presence. There’s no bezel: the crystal is thermally bonded to the case itself, so the dome flows into the metal without a step and lets more light onto the movement. This being the EVO spec, it adds the brand's FlexRing shock absorption mechanism, the two crowns screw down, and you get 80 meters of water resistance. I should reach out to MB&F to see if they'll lend me one to go diving.

The two sub-dials each shows their own time and each has its own crown, which means this is one of the truest ways of displaying two time zones as you can set each to whatever time suits your fancy. Why is that useful? Well, it's one of the rare watches that you can set the time zone for a region like Iran, that is offset from other time zones by 30 minutes and Nepal, which is offset by 45 minutes. Those two sub-dials are black and snailed on both versions, titanium pairs them with a rhodium-plated base plate and blue lumed arrow hands; rose gold gets a green plate and gold hands with lume inlays. Above them, the 14mm balance now sits under a new titanium bridge, and the old vertical power reserve gauge has become an inclined arc at six o’clock.

Inside is a 3D movement developed in-house by MB&F with Jean-François Mojon, under supervision from Kari Voutilainen for the finishing, which explains the gold chatons, Côtes de Genève, polished internal angles, hand engraving and black NAC-treated bridges. The balance still beats at a lazy but cool 2.5Hz, now with a Straumann double hairspring for better stability, and power reserve rises from 45 hours to 60 hours. The rubber strap is integrated into the case, black on titanium and grey on gold, with a folding buckle, and for the first time it swaps out via a quick-release at both the case and clasp.

The titanium LM1 EVO is not limited and is priced at €89,000. The rose gold version is limited to 33, priced at €111,000. Both of those prices are without VAT. See more photos here and the watches on the MB&F website.

⚙️Watch Worthy

• A review of the Atowak Manta-X Violet Purple
• Hands on with the CIGA Design Hunter Tourbillon In Blue

⏲️End links

• Roger Craig receives between 30 to 50 pieces of fan mail every time he checks the mailbox. Mostly, people share memories of the Hall of Fame running back's career with the 49ers, but others write to tell him they are praying for him after he revealed his vascular dementia diagnosis. “I don’t regret it,” says Craig, the man the 49ers owner once called “the epitome of the San Francisco 49ers.” So many former players may one day be afflicted like the 66-year-old Craig, but from my experience, the vast majority feel as he does: He’d do it all over again. This masterful profile by Dan Pompei tells you why.
• Simply put: "Gambling... is not simply paying for the culture. It is the culture." This NYT Magazine essay by Max Read explores how the dystopian tripleheader of gambling, crypto, and prediction markets created a toxic cocktail that blankets every popular media outlet through advertising dollars and publicity stunts. I have had one thought since professional sports embraced gambling so aggressively: Very soon, we’ll have more young people in Gamblers Anonymous than Alcoholics Anonymous.
• Patients are put under anesthesia an estimated 60,000 times per day in U.S. operating rooms and recover perfectly fine. But a number of adolescent boys with a rare genetic mutation suffer extreme consequences following routine procedures. Some stories make you wonder how things in such a regulated business as modern medicine can go so wrong. This is one of them.

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Vuk

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