It is mid-summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and Hublot is bringing the beach party with two new boutiques in the glitzy French coastal towns of Cannes and Saint-Tropez along the famously glamorous French Riviera, or Côte d’Azur. You already see where this is going, right? The new boutiques have been outfitted with a beachy and nautical design featuring azure blue facades – and the new, simply named Hublot Big Bang Blue limited edition watch in a blue ceramic case thematically follows suit.
Blue continues to be a popular color for watches, and the Hublot Big Bang Blue is one of the bluest watches out there. It comes in a familiar 45mm Big Bang case made out of mostly blue ceramic with polished sides and micro-blasted top surfaces. And it also features white composite resin inserts on the sides. Like the case, the bezel is also blue ceramic polished on the sides and micro-blasted on the top to create a matte kind of look and finish. The bezel is held in place with polished titanium H-shaped screws. The crown and pushers are all made out satin-finished titanium. Water-resistance is 100m and the watch will come with two strap choices: white and blue rubber or white rubber with blue alligator leather.
The dial is skeletonized and features the usual dial configuration of other Hublot Big Bang watches: running seconds at 9 o’clock and 60-minute chronograph counter at 3 o’clock. The hands and applied hour indexes are rhodium-plated and satin-finished and filled with white luminescent material for legibility in low-light conditions. There’s an inconspicuous date window at 3 o’clock and surrounding the dial is a blue flange marked with the minutes.
To be honest, looking at the press photos here, it looks like the Hublot Big Bang Blue’s brushed hands against its skeletonized dial might not be the strongest for legibility – even though Hublot has often been known to get this right. But as they say, telling the time on a lifestyle statement watch like this is probably only a secondary consideration. Additionally, what you lose in legibility you gain in being able to see the inner workings of the watch. The skeletonized dial means some of the going train is visible and so is the column-wheel, and seeing those things in action, especially when you activate the chronograph, is pretty cool.
The movement is Hublot’s trusty HUB1242, which is used in many other Hublot Big Bang watches. It is in-house-made and is a self-winding chronograph movement with a flyback mechanism. It consists of 330 components, beats at 4Hz, and has a respectable power reserve of 72 hours. The movement is visible through the watch’s sapphire display case back.
While blue dials have been popular for a while now, fully blue watches like the Hublot Big Bang Blue are naturally less common. And despite its name, the Hublot Big Bang Blue is not the first blue limited edition Big Bang watch – some of the Hublot Big Bang Unico Italia Independent watches (hands-on here), for instance were pretty blue as well. The Hublot Big Bang Blue is limited to just 100 pieces, priced at $21,500, and will initially be available at Hublot’s “summer boutiques.” hublot.com
