With everything that’s happened over the past two years, the pandemics, the melting ice caps, heat waves, floods, and wars, it’s pretty understandable to feel a sense of disconnect with reality and a lack of harmony. Designed to remind you of how beautiful our planet is, and that it’s well worth protecting, the Blue Planet watch by CIGA Design quite literally puts the little blue marble we call home on your wrist. The watch’s stunning design features a micro-carved rotating globe right at its center, which spins 360° to tell time while acting as a pretty nifty aide-memoire of how mesmerizing Earth is.
Designer: CIGA Design
The Blue Planet, as its name rightfully suggests, comes studded with a beautiful blue gem at its center in the form of a detailed, rotating planet that tells time. The rotating hemisphere boasts of a significant amount of detail, with accurate oceans and landmasses, and even relief work in the form of mountains and valleys micro-carved onto the globe. The globe rotates on a central axis, surrounded by two rings with minutes and hours carved into them. While the outermost hour ring remains static, the minute ring in between rotates too, and a compass on the globe helps point out the time.
It’s easy to selectively admire just the detailed planet while glossing over the rest of the timepiece, although the Blue Planet wristwatch is incredibly impressive beyond (and behind) the planet too. For starters, the entire watch comes encased in a seamless, rounded titanium alloy case, with not as much as even a screw in sight to corrupt the watch’s artistic integrity. On top of the dial sits a phenomenal double-domed anti-scratch sapphire crystal that lets you gaze right into the planet underneath, while also giving the watch water-resistance up to 3 ATM underwater. The watch is finally capped off with blue fluororubber straps that are hypoallergenic, durable, and pair pretty wonderfully with the watch’s otherwise minimalist design. The straps rather perfectly blend into the background so the watch’s most impressive detail can shine through.
The Blue Planet’s underlying engineering is pretty impressive too. Relying on an ‘Asynchronous Follow-Up’ movement, the watch features a planet and dial that rotate clockwise at different speeds, ensuring they line up to tell the time perfectly. “After almost a hundred times of tests and research, we successfully changed the gear ratio of the movement to realize that the hour hand rotates 30° when the minute hand rotates 390°”, said the CIGA Design team. “In this way, the hour and minute hands rotate synchronously, which is a transformation of the traditional movement design.”
The Blue Planet is a winner of the extremely coveted Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève (GPHD) award, and as yet another hat-tip to Earth and its cosmic choreography, is limited to just 365 production units.
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