Over the past few years, green has become one of the most popular colors in luxury watchmaking, and the green dial trend shows no signs of slowing in 2022 thus far. Jaeger-LeCoultre aims to bolster its own green offerings with its latest release, with a strikingly unorthodox smoky olive colorway. This unique color palette acts as a platform for the brand’s intensive finishing techniques, elevating this new iteration beyond a simple color swap. The new Jaeger-LeCoultre Polaris Date in green brings a moody, masculine new edge to the brand’s cornerstone sports watch series, blending solid capability with gentlemanly elegance and a boldly modern undercurrent.
Like previous iterations of the Polaris Date, the new Jaeger-LeCoultre Polaris Date in green measures in at an athletic 42mm-wide and 13.92mm-thick. This stainless steel case is a remarkably simple interpretation of the classic Polaris twin-crown supercompressor-style design, with a nearly all-dial look in images spurred on by a slim rounded polished bezel and tightly wrapped, horizontally brushed case sides. The lugs take on muscular, wedgelike forms accentuated by sharply tapering polished chamfers. Of course, the twin gear-toothed crowns at 2 o’clock and 4 o’clock have the largest effect on the case’s character in images, setting itself apart from the sea of single-crown, external bezel dive watches without losing any underwater capability. The Polaris Date’s ocean-ready 200 meters of water resistance backs up this more gentlemanly take on the dive watch with genuine ruggedness.
Jaeger-LeCoultre’s dial treatment for the Polaris Date in green gives the familiar design a complex, atmospheric new personality in images. The base green lacquer hue itself is already a marked departure from most other olive green dial designs on the market. Where most brands aim to replicate the classic U.S. military olive drab tone, Jaeger-LeCoultre instead offers a deeper, desaturated olive color with heavy, almost golden yellow undertones in initial photos. Rather than simply offering an unorthodox base color, however, the brand uses this as a foundation for stylistic experimentation. The central section of the dial uses a dynamic sunburst finish, topped off with a glossy surface and a deep, abrupt fumé effect transitioning from green to nearly pure black. Jaeger-LeCoultre borders this dial segment with a recessed seconds track featuring light azurage, both adding a sense of visual depth to the design and effectively resetting the progress of the fumé effect across the dial in images. From here, the outer dial ring takes on a markedly grainier, more aged effect, with a similar fumé pattern to the central dial. The internal rotating dive bezel continues the tonal progression of the outer dial ring, with a simple rendition in black. Taken as a whole, this gives the new Polaris Date no less than four distinct dial segments, and offers the unique spectacle of two concentric fumé rings around the dial. The rest of the dial layout is shared with the rest of the Polaris Date line, including the skeletonized baton handset, the mix of elongated applied indices and athletic squarish Arabic numerals, and the cutout date window at 3 o’clock. Jaeger-LeCoultre complements the yellow-green shades of the dial surface with a muted khaki fauxtina lume fill, along with hazard orange highlights on the dive bezel and central seconds hand.
Jaeger-LeCoultre powers the Polaris Date in green with its in-house 899AB automatic movement. The 899AB is one of the newer additions to the brand’s movement roster, and offers thoroughly modern performance including a 70 hour power reserve at a 28,800 bph beat rate. To complete the package, the brand fits the new Polaris Date with a dial-matching olive green rubber strap featuring a detailed hobnail texture.
By bringing a masculine, modern new energy and dramatic dial finishing to the brand’s most famous sports watch platform, the Jaeger-LeCoultre Polaris Date in green delivers a refined, complex take on one of the hottest colors in modern watchmaking. The Jaeger-LeCoultre Polaris Date in green is available now through authorized dealers. MSRP for the Jaeger-LeCoultre Polaris Date in green stands at $9,200 as of press time. For more details, please visit the brand’s website.
