A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

21st October 2021

Wrap your glazzies around this choodessny piece: the latest feat of alchemy to emerge from Hublot’s materials skunkworks, casing up a micro-rotor-powered tourbillon in sapphire crystal, coloured orange for the first-ever time. Words by Alex Doak.

76280 | £140,000

MHUB6035 is powered by the movement of your wrist, mediated via the spin of a grey, 22-carat gold micro-rotor at 12 o’clock, mirroring the tumbling tourbillon below with pleasing symmetry, hand-decorated with bevelling, sunray-brushing and sand-blasting.

After a fully transparent case in 2016, followed by black, blue, red and yellow, Hublot has well and truly cemented its synthetic-sapphire credentials here, packaged in the world’s first orange sapphire case – achieved thanks to the incorporation of titanium and chromium into the aluminium-oxide crystal, somewhere between 2,000 and 2,050 degrees Celsius.

To make the micro-rotor visible dial-side required a novel layout of mechanics – an additional technical challenge for the designers, of course, but an approach that breathes new life in aesthetic terms, suspended diaphanously from skeletonised platinum.

On top of the orange sapphire, this watch furthers Hublot’s mastery of the tourbillon, which it’s been elevating in typically modernist fashion since 2007. Over 200 years ago, Abraham-Louis Breguet would no doubt be proud of his friction-reducing invention’s modernist reincarnation!

The legibility of the open dial is enhanced by hands and indices flecked with orange-tinted Super-LumiNova luminescent coating.

Not satisfied with pioneering orange synthetic sapphire alone, Hublot’s quest for transparency led to using more sapphire in the movement itself. Calibre MHUB6035 is equipped for the first time with three sapphire bridges, substituting the usual steel plates.

The transparent orange rubber strap, lined in sweat-wicking relief boasts a patented ‘One Click’ interchangeability system and titanium deployant buckle – completes the cutting-edge look of this limited edition release of 50 pieces.

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