Flint is a London-based watch brand that has been riffing on a single minimalist dress watch design since August of 2017. That 38-millimeter watch is shaped like a puck, with no lugs, a relatively flat crown, a white no-date dial with tiny numerals and markers and hair-thin hands. All of that restraint seems to be in service of helping the uniquely crafted bezels catch our eyes.
And the bezels are quite eye-catching. Flint offers them in either marble, raw copper, or copper that’s been oxidized to turn either green or blue. Those green and blue bezels aren’t your typical muted blue-green patina, but instead are rendered in saturated, complex colors that look more like jewel-stones than tarnish. Oxidizing the copper—a process called patination—involves application of various chemicals onto the copper, then seizing that process and locking the result in place with a sealant. All of that metal-craft, plus all assembly and finishing, is done in England (parts are mostly Swiss).Technically, the bezels are bezels in the sense that they are attached to the case in order to hold the crystal, but visually the brushed stainless steel case and the bezel seem like equal partners in a sandwich design. This is especially true when looking at the watch in profile, where this sandwich effect is most obvious.