Summer, Colour and a Candy Jar
It was the hottest hour in the little seaside town. The midday light pouring through the windows of the painter Mira's studio lit up the paint stains on the floor, the half-finished canvases leaning against the wall, and the dozens of open tubes of colour on the table. Mira was someone who breathed through colour; to her, a grey day was a day left untasted. When the door knocked, she still held a brush smeared with orange.
It was her old friend Leo; someone who looked at design, form and detail with the same passion Mira felt for colour. When he came in, there was a watch on his wrist that caught the sun and split it into a thousand tiny sparks. Mira set down her brush and drew closer: the dial was a vivid red, deepening from the edges toward the centre, as though a shimmering sweet had been crushed inside it.
"What on earth is this?" said Mira, her eyes shining. Leo smiled: "Christopher Ward's new toy. The Twelve 36, the 'Pic'n'Mix' series. Christopher Ward is a British independent brand; it sells its watches directly to you, skipping the middlemen, which is why it can offer a watch of this quality at a far more honest price. But the real point is this: they made this series for people exactly like you, people in love with colour."
format_quote"A grey day is a day left untasted."
Mira
The Candy Inside the Dial: How Colour Is Born
Leo slipped off the watch and set it in Mira's palm. As she turned it to the light the dial shifted; the red deepened and brightened from angle to angle. "They call it a sugar-crystal dial," said Leo. "The surface is made of thousands of tiny crystals, just like the inside of a lollipop or a piece of rock candy. Because the light strikes these crystals and refracts in every direction, the colour never stands still; it trembles, alive, just like your wet paints."
"And it is not one colour," he added. "The series comes in six different flavours, and even their names are sweets: Blue Shubert, Kola Krystals, Apple Sour, Cherry Pop, Orange Fiz and Berry Burst. Each dial carries a degrade, a gradient, from the edges toward the centre; as if the colour gathers in the middle and melts away toward the corners. They have carried onto the wrist that happy indecision of a child standing before the candy jar, asking 'which one should I choose?'"
Mira laughed. "So I choose a colour just as I would choose a canvas." "Exactly," said Leo. "But this canvas keeps repainting itself under the sun."
format_quote"This canvas keeps repainting itself under the sun."
Leo
A Light Joy: Titanium and Twelve Sides
"And why is it so light?" asked Mira, weighing it in her hand. "Because the case is not steel but Grade 2 titanium," said Leo. "Titanium is far lighter than steel; this 36-millimetre watch sits on the wrist as though it were barely there, like the lightest linen shirt you wear in summer. And the surfaces of the case are brushed, polished and sandblasted all at once; the light plays differently on each area."
"Look at this bezel," Leo went on, pointing to the ring around the dial. "It is not round, but twelve-sided. That is where the watch gets its name: The Twelve. Its designer, Adrian Buchmann, used this dodecagonal form to give the whole watch a rhythm, a backbone. And the bracelet is integrated; it flows uninterrupted from the case, which gives it that modern, sporty stance."
A Serious Heart, a Playful Soul
"When it looks this much fun, you assume no one took the movement inside it seriously," said Mira. Leo turned the watch over; through the transparent sapphire back the mechanical heart was visible. "That is exactly the mistake," he said. "Inside beats a Swiss-made Sellita SW300-1 automatic movement, and it is COSC certified, meaning a chronometer. That means an independent institute tested the watch for days and confirmed that its rate strays by only a few seconds a day. It has about 56 hours of power reserve; even if you took it off and set it aside for a whole weekend, it would still be running."
"There is even a surprise on the front crystal," he added. "The 'Pic'n'Mix' logo is printed onto the sapphire. And the watch comes to you not with one strap but two, a titanium bracelet and a coloured rubber strap; you can swap them in seconds, with no tool. Serious on the bracelet in the morning, a child again on the coloured rubber in the evening."
"And the best part," said Leo, lowering his voice, "is that thanks to that honest sales model skipping the middlemen, all of this, a watch carrying a Swiss chronometer, comes at a price far below what such a watch usually asks. This joy is more within reach than you would think."
format_quote"A watch being fun does not mean it is not serious."
Leo
Pick a Handful of Colour
Mira fastened the watch to her own wrist and reached her hand into the light from the window. The red dial suddenly began to speak the same language as all those tubes of paint in the studio. For a moment she thought that time, too, could be a colour: one that flows away, yet grows a little brighter with every instant.
"Which would you choose?" asked Leo. Mira laughed: "How can anyone choose a single sweet in front of a candy jar? But today, this red. Tomorrow perhaps that green, the day after that blue." Leo nodded: "That is the whole point. This watch gives you the freedom to choose not a single time, but a mood."
Outside the sea glittered, in the studio the colours dried, and on the wrist a small titanium sweet counted out all the joy of summer, second by second.
