Blancpain 38 mm Fifty Fathoms Bathyscaphe Watch

Blancpain first introduced its Fifty Fathoms diver’s watch collection in 1953 and today, the popular 43mm Fifty Fathoms Bathyscaphe gets a little brother- a 38 mm timepiece dressed in abyss blue. The new three-hand 38 mm Fifty Fathoms Bathyscaphe model in a blue shade represents the depths of the ocean, with a steel bezel featuring a blue ceramic insert and hour-markers in Liquidmetal®, an alloy known for its deformation resistance and its long-term stability.

The watch features sharply defined contours and hands with a traditional vintage look. It’s equipped with a unidirectional bezel rotating counter-clockwise by small notches, and a luminescent dot on the bezel serves as an index for divers, enabling accurate alignment with the minutes hand and thereby defining the start of a given dive time. During the immersion, the seconds hand serves as an operating indicator.

Water-resistant to 30 bar (approximately 300 meters), the Fifty Fathoms Bathyscaphe is powered by Caliber 1150, noted for its robustness and its chronometric performance it’s equipped with two series-coupled barrels ensuring a 100-hour power reserve while guaranteeing constant energy. The caliber is visible through a sapphire crystal case-back for easy viewing of the solid gold oscillating weight coated in NAC (a platinum alloy) and sculpted to form the raised Blancpain logo.

Its silicon balance-spring is a relatively recent watch industry innovation that features several advantages: low density reducing its weight, greater shock resistance, as well as imperviousness to magnetic fields.

8,900 CHF (circa £7,000) from BLANCPAIN