Timex Releases Incredible Real Stone Dials At A Bargain Price Point; Oak & Oscar's Humboldt GMT SAR; Panerai Celebrates Year Of The Snake; New ArtyA Is All About Customization; And A Stunning New Bovet

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. I’ve been looking at stone dials all year, figuring out which one I should get. But now that Timex has put them at such a low price point, I’m thinking I should get three.

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In this issue:

• Timex Saves Best For Last — Three Timex Q Super Affordable Watches With Real Stone Dials

• Oak & Oscar Introduces The Humboldt GMT SAR Edition Made With The St. Louis County Rescue Squad

• Panerai Joins In On The Year Of The Snake Celebration With The New Luminor Perpetual Calendar

• The New ArtyA Gears Collection Will Allow You To Customize A Chronograph In High End Materials

• Bovet Intorduces Beautiful Sapphire Dials To The Récital 21 Retrograde Perpetual Calendar

👂What’s new

1/

Timex Saves Best For Last — Three Timex Q Super Affordable Watches With Real Stone Dials

Just the other day I wrote how this was the year of stone dials. Everyone from high end and newly introduced Berneron Mirage with a Tiger Eye Dial, to the affordable stone dials from micro-brands like the three cool Baltic Prismics. Well, a trend is not a trend until Timex jumps on it. Luckily, here we are. Timex is introducing the Q Timex Quartz collection with stone dials and, just to save you the time, they are priced at a pretty great €199.

The basics first. It’s the same Q Timex that’s been around for five years or so, with its angular case and 12 hour bezel on top. Timex markets this model as a women’s model, but come on — it measures 36mm wide and 12mm thick, making it pretty comfortable on most wrists. The watch comes on a stretch bracelet that will fit wrists between 5.3 to 7.5 inches in circumference, which means I’m out of luck. If I wanted to fit a different strap on the watch, it would have to be 16mm wide. Both the stretch bracelet and the case have a gold PVD coat to it, with different colored bezel inserts to match the dials. On top is a domed acrylic crystal. Inside you’ll find a simple quartz movement with an opening in the back to do the battery swap. Water resistance is 50 meters.

So, these three new watches are special for their dials, all fit with semi-precious. These aren’t particularly rare stones, but they are very likely the most affordable on the market. There’s the blue lapis lazuli with golden pyrite inclusions, the green malachite with horizontal streaks, and the tiger’s eye in golden brown and a very 70’s look. Interestingly, the EU website shows just the tiger’s eye and malachite, while the US one does include the lapis lazuli. I wonder what that’s all about.

The Timex Q Timex Quartz collection with stone dials are available now and priced at a pretty spectacular €199. Could be an interesting Christmas present. See more on the Timex website.

2/

Oak & Oscar Introduces The Humboldt GMT SAR Edition Made With The St. Louis County Rescue Squad

Every summer here in Croatia, hundreds of tourists overestimate their capabilities and underestimate the rough terrain of our mountains. Or decide to float out on blow-up swans halfway to Italy. And every single time, the incredible team of the Croatian Mountain Rescue Service (HGSS), all of who are volunteers, head out to find them and bring them back. Over the years I have gotten to know a couple of their members and certainly a lot of their dogs, and it’s very easy to be in awe by what they do. It seems that the folks over at Oak & Oscar, the Chicago-based watch brand, spend a lot of time at Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) where the St. Louis County Rescue Squad does the same thing the HGSS does in Croatia. But instead of just admiring them, Oak & Oscar built a watch for the team. This is the Humboldt GMT SAR Edition.

As the name suggests, this is a watch based on the Humboldt GMT, a watch launched in 2022. Only, this new SAR Edition comes in a very cool grade 5 titanium case. It measures 39.5mm wide, 12.5mm thick and has a 46.8mm lug-to-lug. On top is a sapphire crystal, surrounded by a bezel that has a blue ceramic insert. A change from the regular GMT version is the printing on the bezel, which is now a compass, something that helps with the St. Louis County Rescue Squad requirement in training - learning how to use a watch-mounted compass bezel in case of an emergency.

The dial has a matte blue finish, with a sandwich construction. The lower surface is filled with white lumed paint, and around the periphery of the dial is an orange minute track. Further out is a sloping flange that holds the 24 hour scale. The hands are great looking — matte blue with white lume for the hours and minutes, a slender orange seconds hand with an interesting coutnerbalance, and an additional blue hand with an arrow tip in orange and white for the GMT function.

Inside is the automatic Sellita SW330, a well-known movement that beats at 4Hz and has a 56 hour power reserve. The set the GMT hand independently, making it a caller-style GMT. The watch comes on with both a orange rubber strap with a titanium pin buckle and a tan nylon strap.

The Oak & Oscar Humboldt GMT SAR Edition is limited to 50 pieces and is priced at $2,350, which is a $175 increase over the regular steel version of the watch. Part of the proceeds will be donated to the St. Louis County Rescue Squad. See more on the Oak & Oscar website.

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Panerai Joins In On The Year Of The Snake Celebration With The New Luminor Perpetual Calendar

Like we’ve seen several times in the past two weeks, we are entering the months of Chinese New Year celebration. It’s a time in which watch brands come out with extremely expensive variants of their regular watches that feature traditional Chinese cultural symbols, as well as references to the upcoming animal that marks the New Year. Coming soon is the Year of the Snake, and Panerai is honoring it with the Luminor Perpetual Calendar Chinese Characters which not only uses the red-gold combination we’ve seen from other Chinese New Year-themed watches, but also uses a very special reference number — PAM01688. The last two digits of the number — 88 — are considered lucky in Chinese tradition, linked to a life of good fortune.

The new watch is based on the Luminor Perpetual Calendar we’ve seen before. It measures 44mm wide, but it’s also made out of Goldtech, Panerai’s proprietary 18k gold alloy with added copper and platinum. I know that it’s tougher to retain water resistance on precious metals, but there’s plenty of brands that do it. So a 50 meter water resistance on a Panerai Luminor is just not acceptable.

What is acceptable is that beautiful red sun-brushed sandwich dial that fades to a black on the edges. The dial features gold hands, filled with lume, and has a day and date indicator at 3 o’clock, both in Chinese. At 9 o’clock is a running seconds display with a 24 hour indicator. Flip the watch over and you’ll see a sapphire case back that allows you to see the month, year, and leap year indicators, as well as the offset micro-rotor.

Inside is the P.4100 automatic movement which has a double barrel system that gives it a 72 hour power reserve and all the functions can be adjusted with just the crown, with no additional tool necessary. The watch comes on a black alligator leather strap.

The Panerai Luminor Perpetual Calendar Chinese Characters PAM01688 is limited to 100 pieces and priced at $48,000. See more on the Panerai website.

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The New ArtyA Gears Collection Will Allow You To Customize A Chronograph In High End Materials

The independent watch brand ArtyA headed by Yvan Arpa is perhaps best known for their incredible use of sapphire crystals to make watch cases. Not only are they stunning, especially with those cases that change color, but they also brought down the cost of these cases a lot. That doesn’t mean they are cheap, but in a world where other brands charge six figures for sapphire cases, the CHF 30k they charge for their watches is a steal. And now they’re bringing this more affordable, but still very expensive, approach to customization of high-end chronographs with high-tech case materials. This is the new ArtyA Gears collection.

Everything is customizable about this watch. There are seven case materials and 11 dial colors, giving you at least 77 unique possibilities. But even then, there are more combinations. And when ArtyA says unique, they mean unique. Only one watch in each combination will be made. You can get the watch in stainless steel, with or without a black DLC coating; Damascus steel; TiDamas, which is a grade 2 and grade 5 titanium mixed to get a Damascus pattern; forged carbon which can be dyed pretty much any color; and you can also get it in the cool sapphire crystal.

As far as the dials are concerned, they are completely skeletonized letting you see all the gears which lend their name to the collection. The lower part of the dial remains the same, with the exposed gears, and you get to customize the top part which has rings for sub-dials, an outer ring for the minutes and applied hour indices, as well as a space for the ArtyA logo with 1/1 to denote its unique piece status. That part is made out of coloured enamel. The color options seem limitless.

Inside is a movement that’s based on the ETA/Valjoux 7750 chronograph but heavily, heavily modified. It’s skeletonised by Concepto Watch Factory, the same company that makes the dials for the new Bugatti hypercar. It beats at 4Hz and has a 48 hour power reserve. The watches come on rubber straps that can be had in a myriad of colors.

The new ArtyA Gears collection can be ordered now with your choice of combinations. But best of all, like I said, is the pricing. The stainless steel versions are priced at $11,700; the Damascus, TiDamas and carbon at $17,600, while the sapphire version is priced at $41,300. See more on the ArtyA website.

5/

Bovet Intorduces Beautiful Sapphire Dials To The Récital 21 Retrograde Perpetual Calendar

Don’t you just love when Bovet releases a new watch? More often than not, they are incredibly dramatic, way over the top, shockingly expensive and overall very cool. Well, their new take on the Récital 21 Retrograde Perpetual Calendar with brand new sapphire dials is just… wow.

The new Récital 21 Retrograde Perpetual Calendar keeps the signature sloping Dimier case, but it’s now made out of grade 5 titanium. It’s fully polished, with four screwed lugs and a knurled crown with a green cabochon sapphire at the end. It measures 44mm wide, a and thanks to the “writing desk” style case it has a thickness of 15.4mm at 12 o’clock and 10.25mm at 6 o’clock.

While you might not notice the novelty of a titanium case from a photography, you will notice the new dial which is made out of sapphire crystal, showing you the inside of the watch. There’s a choice of green, blue or brown sapphire crystals, but they all feature the same day of the week, leap year indication and month apertures at 12, 3 and 6 o’clock, respectively. You get a reshaped retrograde date function from 8 to 4 o’clock with white numerals and a small centrally-mounted arrow. The hour and minute hands are now openworked and lumed, with a peripheral minutes track with luminescent arrow-shaped indices and circular minute markers.

Inside you’ll find the Bovet calibre 13DM05-QPR, a manual-winding movement that beats at 3Hz and has a 5 day hour power reserve. The movement also has a very cool specially developed mechanism that slows down the date hand during its retrograde jump, making for a very dramatic shift. The watches come on a green, blue or brown alligator strap, depending on the color of the dial.

The Bovet Récital 21 Retrograde Perpetual Calendar is limited to 60 pieces in each color and it’s priced at CHF 92,000, without tax. See more on the Bovet website.

🫳On hand

Our selection of the best reviews we stumble upon

1/

A review of the Tudor Pelagos FXD Chrono “Cycling Edition”

2/

Hands on with the Omega Seamaster Diver 300M With A Steel Dial And Titanium Bezel

3/

A review of the Geo Cofresí

⚙️Watch Worthy

A look at an off beat, less known watch you might actually like

The Tusenö Windseeker, A Serious All-Rounder Watch at a Fair Price

The case has nice details overall, with very decent quality. While the sides are polished, the top surface of the lugs is brushed, and both sections are connected by an appealing bevel. The middle case is topped by a relatively high bezel, which once again combines several finishes: circular brushed at the bottom, polished bevel and vertically brushed top surface. The Windseeker comes fully equipped with AR coating on the sapphire crystal, a large screw-in crown with an embossed brand logo, a see-through screwed back and a depth rating of 100m. And once you have it in your hands, it has a reassuring heft, the kind of weight that contributes to the feel of quality.

Read the whole review on Monochrome

⏲️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

• Have you ever gazed at an opened Amazon box and contemplated the entire history of paper packaging? No? Well, you’re in luck. Shannon Mattern’s thoughtful and well-researched essay on the history of the cardboard box and the art and science of paper packaging is the deep dive you didn’t know you needed.

• Opioids ravaged a Kentucky town. Then rehab became its business. Addiction Recovery Care, or ARC, has become the biggest company in Louisa, Kentucky. It’s helped those with opioid abuse issues get clean, and it’s trained them for jobs both inside and outside ARC. But its success hasn’t necessarily been embraced by the townspeople. Oliver Whang approaches the matter—and the town, and those living in it—with nuance and humanity.

• If it manages to avoid bankruptcy and sticks around long enough to advance, AI will attempt to come for all our jobs. Among those more immediately threatened are writers and artists, and people who teach other people about writing and art. Phil Christman is one of those. He loves literature, he loves what he does, and he wants to understand it, defend it, and convince the “long-termist” ChatGPT fans of its value—although short of that, he’ll cope with shoehorning literature into other educational trends if that means it gets to stick around.

👀Watch this

One video you have to watch today

Hey, it’s Chris Harris and a warehouse of rare Porsches. All is good with the world.

-Vuk