While I haven’t been doing “this” as long as some who have been in the watch media trenches since a time when you could reliably get a discount on a brand new Rolex at an authorized dealer, I’ve been doing it long enough to get a sense of the rhythms of a new release season. We are, as of yesterday, in the thick of it. LVMH Watch Week is the unofficial (but also kind of official) kick off of a new year in novelties from big luxury group brands, and within the confines of the LVMH experience there’s one tradition that stands out to me that’s become something I look forward to and get genuinely excited about: seeing what kind of crazy sapphire or SAXEM cased watch Hublot has come up with. Pretty reliably, on a year to year basis, Hublot shows us a wild and colorful and extremely expensive watch in an exotic, glass-adjacent material. This year, like clockwork, they’re back with the Big Bang Tourbillon Automatic Green SAXEM, a watch whose name is nearly doing my job for me.
I’ve made no secret over the years of how much I enjoy these oversized, translucent watches. If I had to pick a favorite, it would probably be the purple sapphire Big Bang Tourbillon from 2022, but I’ll thank you in advance for not actually making me choose, because frankly these watches all do their thing equally well, and choosing the one you like best is like picking your favorite Coen Brothers movie. Some days it’s Fargo and on others it’s No Country for Old Men but maybe on Sundays you go for Barton Fink. They’re all great, and ranking them, like our colorful sapphire and SAXEM Hublots, is a futile exercise.
With the Big Bang Tourbillon Automatic Green SAXEM, the brand has returned to the same platform as my beloved purple sapphire tourbillon, but it’s now in their signature dark green shade of SAXEM, a material that Hublot tells us is distinct from sapphire, but for me, a watch enthusiast with, somewhat regrettably, no real experience in materials science, is functionally pretty much the same thing. To be sure, Hublot likes to point out that the material is different on a molecular and structural level, and that these nuances translate to SAXEM being a material better able to take on “more intense” colors. I’ve had both SAXEM and sapphire cased Hublots on the wrist during watch industry events and will concede that their green SAXEM material does have a denser, more gem-like appearance, as opposed to their purple sapphire which is more translucent and glassy.
Unlike other sapphire and SAXEM watches Hublot has released in recent years that feature color matched rubber straps, this new Big Bang tourbillon has been unveiled with a black strap, and I think that contrast makes a pretty big difference. The watches with color matched straps are incredibly cool, but have a toy-like, somewhat less serious vibe to them. That, of course, could be exactly the point – I don’t think anyone would argue these watches are meant to be taken completely seriously. But the addition of a black strap, matched not to the case material but to the coating of the skeletonized movement seen from the dial side, just makes the whole thing look a bit sleeker.
That movement is the MHUB6035, an automatic tourbillon caliber developed in-house at Hublot, and featuring a 22 karat gold micro-rotor positioned dramatically at 12:00 and viewable from the dial side (the tourbillon provides some balance at 6:00). On a full wind it’ll run for 72 hours. The movement is housed in a case measuring 44mm in diameter and 14.4mm thick. That sounds big, and it is big, but one thing you should ask yourself is why anyone who would pay $231,000 for one of the 18 examples of this watch that will be made would want it to fly under the radar, let alone under a cuff.
More information on the Big Bang Tourbillon Automatic Green SAXEM can be found on Hublot’s website here.