On March 13th, Favre-Leuba celebrated its anniversary: on that day in 1737, Abraham Favre was officially registered as a watchmaker.

“It is oxidating but it will be a slow process,” Maurice Lacroix managing director Stéphane Waser points out, referring to the patina on the month-old Aikon Venturer Bronze I had in my hands. The faint patina – the slight darkening on its bronze shell is actually a layer of copper oxide, formed when copper reacted with oxygen. 

In celebration of Grand Seiko’s 60th anniversary, Caliber 9RA5 is first presented in a professional diver’s watch. Before the creation of Spring Drive, the choice was stark. Either you chose a mechanical watch and enjoyed its traditional character and autonomy but tolerated its relative imprecision or you wore an electronic watch that was up to ten times more accurate but required a battery. In 1999, Spring Drive resolved this dilemma by combining the best of both the existing two watch technologies in a watch powered by a mainspring that offered accuracy of one second a day. Spring Drive was then, and remains today, one of horology’s greatest advances. Now, two decades on, Grand Seiko introduces the caliber 9RA5 which takes Spring Drive technology to a new level of excellence and opens a new era in the history of the brand.

In the early 2000s, except for in a few isolated markets, diamond-set watches for men were neither fashionable nor generally available. Twenty years on, watchmakers have (finally) come around to the idea that a diamond, well considered, well cut and well positioned, can be a welcome addition to a masculine timepiece. There’s a fine line between discreet and ostentatious, elegant and flashy, brilliant and blinding... and watchmakers have finally found it.

Some people might say that there are better times to release a watch than right in the middle of a global respiratory disease pandemic. Some brands might choose to wait for a more optimistic market to make more of an impact and target consumers who are getting back into the mood for spending. That’s fair; everyone’s entitled to an opinion. If you ask me, however, the MB&F Horological Machine No 10 “Bulldog” couldn’t have come at a better time. Let me explain.

The steering committee of the Geneva Watch Days, initially planned for late April 2020, has postponed the event due to the Covid-19 fast expansion in Europe and the rest of the world. This initiative launched by several major luxury brands including Bvlgari, Breitling, Ulysse Nardin, Girard-Perregaux, Gerald Genta, Urwerk, H. Moser & Cie, De Bethune and MB&F, will now take place  from August 26th to August 29th   2020 in Geneva Hotels and Boutiques as per initial project.

I don’t mean that literally. Don’t forget the news. Stay updated and stay safe, WorldTempus family. However, if you (like many of us) feel saturated with gloomy predictions and cataclysmic data projections, there’s a solution coming up in the week right before you.

To people familiar with some of the recent headline stories in the world of vintage watch auctions, it sounds like a no-brainer. Of course, watches are good financial investments. Imagine buying a watch for just over $200 in 1968 and having it sell for $17.8 million in 2017? (This really happened, by the way.) Investing in the right watch now could yield you incredible returns in the future, right? Alas, these blockbuster sales are the exception rather than the norm. If there’s anything I’ve learned in my years in this industry, it’s that people who say they’ve made money through watch investing are either lying or really lucky. And I mean winning-the-lottery kind of lucky. I get asked all the time by new, bright-eyed collectors what watch is going to make them the most resale money, and… it just doesn’t work like that.

De Bethune presents the DB25 Starry Varius in a refined version: in 5N rose gold. The DB25 interpreted in a soft and warm precious metal, synonymous with subtle and discreet elegance has a personalized constellation at the centre of its dial, revisited lugs and an original 42mm case. Upstream of the "classic" unisex pink gold version with the reference DB25VRS3, the brand has also launched the diamond-set case model, with the reference DB25VRDJS3.

A.Lange & Söhne dedicates a series of 4 videos to its Odysseus model, a sporty-elegant watch in stainless steel that was launched last year.
The first video is about the design of the watch, the second deals with the finishing, the third with the engraving, and the fourth with the assembly.