Sandra‘s Closet

You know that I have a big thing for rainbow watches and today I would like to present a new one that has absolutely caught my eye.
Since 2017, Hublot has been setting its watches with all the colours of the rainbow. However, the watch brand has never combined all of its seven colours in one piece. Until now! Two exceptional High Jewellery pieces adorned with the full rainbow spectrum, from the case to the dial and to the bracelet. Two Big Bang Tourbillon models made from King Gold or white gold, which allow a glimpse beneath the sapphire to reveal the fascinating automatic tourbillon manufacture movement.

While Hublot is now completely synonymous with its Art of Fusion, the watch brand is also a master of the Art of Colour. It excels at imbuing all the materials it uses with colour, from those it has built expertise in, such as sapphire, to those it has patented, like vibrantly coloured ceramic.

Polishing of the stone

With a Pop Art spirit and a penchant for bright tones, Hublot loves its watches to really show their colours. Juxtapositions, gradations, contrasts, no Pantone is out of reach – not even the palette required for «Rainbow Maximalism». While the Rainbow trend has recently taken the fashion world by storm, for Hublot, this love of polychromy is anything but fleeting – unlike the rainbow itself – with the first Big Bang Rainbow released in 2017.

Stone heating

This piece totals almost 36 carats, with 484 invisibly set baguette-cut stones of seven different types to echo the seven visible colours of the spectrum: bright red rubies, fuchsia pink sapphires, ultraviolet amethysts, topaz in Klein blue, leaf green tsavorites, lemon yellow sapphires and bright orange sapphires. Two striking creations with generous dimensions of 43 mm; two unique pieces crafted from King Gold or white gold, with the integrated bracelet further reinforcing the visual impact, as the graduated spectrum of colours radiates outwards from the bezel to the bracelet.

Gem setting

The colour gradation is expertly executed, subtle yet captivating. It would be impossible to choose a favourite colour or stone. It must be said that, when it comes to perfectly combining and harmonising colours, nature knows best. The continuous transition between the seven types of stones further accentuates the piece’s artistic appeal. To reproduce the perfection of nature takes 1200 hours of work, selecting the stones, choosing their colours, cutting them and setting them to ensure the perfect gradation of colours. Nothing is left to chance in this work of art, including its mechanism, a manufacture movement entirely designed and manufactured in-house. It features a tourbillon at 6 o’clock which is no less striking than the piece itself: self-winding, with a micro-rotor visible on the dial side, and three bridges made from transparent sapphire. Once again, Hublot has fused innovation with expertise, combining Haute Horlogerie and Haute Joaillerie in a truly stunning watch.

Multicoloured is no longer a fashion faux pas; rather a deliberate multifaceted style. With all the colours of the rainbow combined in a single watch, are you ready for a look versatile enough for your every mood?

LoL, Sandra

Photos: © Hublot

For the first time ever, a watchmaker has decorated a watch with the turquoise brilliance of a cuprian elbaite. Hublot has electrified its Big Bang with the naturally vibrant and intense colours of the Paraíba Tourmaline, a stone whose rarity can only be fully appreciated when learning that, on average, a single Paraíba Tourmaline is mined for every 10,000 diamonds.

With its unique colour, this stone has fascinated jewellers since it was first discovered in 1989 in the Brazilian state of Paraíba. Its rarity makes it more expensive than traditional precious stones such as diamonds, emeralds and rubies. The secret of this magnetic stone’s colour lies in its fusion of gold, manganese and copper; an incandescent glow seems to illuminate the stone from within.

Certified by the world’s largest gemmological laboratories, the Paraíba Tourmalines set into Hublot’s Big Bang are mined from the Rio Grande region of Brazil. Thanks to its long-term partnership with Pierre Salanitro, Hublot benefits from an exclusive agreement with a mine that operates in an environmentally sustainable way, and complies fully with local and international governing ethics. The mine strives to preserve the earth that yields this unique material, and is committed to reforestation of the region, only using clean water for its extraction operations to prevent soil pollution.

While the Paraíba Tourmaline is an extremely rare stone, certain cuts are more exclusive than others. One such example is the baguette cut, which requires stones of a perfectly uniform colour. This is why five times more raw material was required for the initial stone selection, and also why, when each stone was baguette-cut, only 70% of these could be set – 30% were rejected due to breakage or insufficiently uniform quality or colour. This stone, more fragile than emerald, requires considerable expertise and dexterity both to cut and to set, and the process can take up to three times longer than that for a diamond.

A blue that radiates green, a turquoise reminiscent of a blue lagoon whose depth is enhanced by sunshine, the colour of a Paraíba Tourmaline changes thanks to its extreme sensitivity to light. A watch you can’t take your eyes off, that almost invites you to dive in.

The Hublot Big Bang Paraíba is available in 4 models.

Big Bang Unico Paraíba – 45 mm
In white gold or King Gold (a Hublot alloy of 18K gold with copper and platinum), the Big Bang Unico Paraíba invites you to dive into the lucid waters of its 48 baguette-cut and 388 brilliant-cut stones. Its transparency extends to the skeletonised UNICO HUB1242 manufacture movement, whose gear trains and column wheel on the dial side are all visible.

Big Bang One Click Paraíba – 39 mm
Featuring a bezel set with 48 baguette-cut Paraíba Tourmalines, a 39-mm case adorned with 129 brilliant-cut Paraíba Tourmalines, a sunray dial picked out with 11 brilliant-cut Paraíba Tourmalines, SuperLuminova-filled hands and a patented One Click interchangeable strap in alligator sewn onto rubber, the Big Bang Paraíba radiates the turquoise hues of this rarest of stones. Available in white gold or King Gold (a Hublot alloy of 18K gold with copper and platinum), it beats to the rhythm of a HUB1710 self-winding mechanical movement with the date at 3 o’clock and a power reserve of 50 hours.

LoL, Sandra

Photos: © Hublot