A colourful year for watches

WITH Watches & Wonders 2022 just weeks away, brands traditionally not part of the mega event in Geneva, Switzerland, are leveraging the build-up and rolling out new timepieces of their own. With colourful dials in fashion, expect to see many more from these brands.

• Omega Seamaster Aqua Terra

The brand's 2022 collection is all about colour - and this is most obvious in the dials of the new Aqua Terra timepieces. They come in Atlantic Blue, Bay Green, Sandstone, Saffron and Terracotta for the 38 mm wide model, and Sea Blue, Lagoon Green, Sandstone, Shell Pink and Lavender for the 34 mm version. While the stainless steel cases of these 10 watches are practically identical to the current generation of Aqua Terra models, they now come fully polished. The attached three-link steel bracelet has been redesigned with rounded links. The makeovers come just in time to mark the 20th anniversary of the Aqua Terra, the first Omega watch to be powered by a movement that is antimagnetic up to 15,000 gauss - a feature now standard across the brand's four major collections.

Yet some things stay unchanged. The latest Aqua Terras still run on Omega's flagship automatic movement, Caliber 8800, which is a certified Master Chronometer that makes the timepieces highly anti-magnetic.

Price: S$8,850

• Chanel BOY-FRIEND Skeleton Red and BOY-FRIEND Skeleton X-Ray Red

Red is one of the brand's five signature colours, which also include white, black, beige and gold. This year, red takes the limelight as the signature hue of Chanel's timepieces. The outline of BOY-FRIEND stays the same, but the red adds a note of contrast. The red embossed leather strap is similar to the lining of Chanel's 2.55 handbag; the red of the movement, combined with the powdered beige gold shade, suggests a deep lipstick hue. As with current models, these two watches - one with a 18K beige gold case and the other in a crystal sapphire one - are also driven by the Caliber 3 hand-wound movement, which has a power reserve of 55 hours.

Thanks to the skeletal movement, visible through the dial, "the watches present the appearance of a graphic fragment of lace embroidered with bridges and cogwheels, which offers subtle glimpses of the skin beneath". Chanel says the architectural aesthetic and movement of the BOY-FRIEND highlight the timepiece's close affinity with the codes of masculinity.

Price: S$216,500 (Skeleton Red, limited to 55 pieces), S$129,900 (X-Ray Red, limited 100 pieces)

• Moritz Grossmann Universalzeit

This world-time watch by the independent German watch brand indicates the current time to the minute all around the globe. All it takes is a single glance at its world map dial - complete with oceans, salmon-coloured continents and the network of longitude and latitude points in white - and you can tell the time in cities across seven time zones.

On the dial, which has a luminous blue tone and is framed in a 44.5 mm stainless steel case, are time windows precisely aligned with coordinates and city names that provide orientation in time and geography. There are 6 windows that display the hour from 1 to 24 in each of the 6 cities, including Singapore. Daylight savings time is not observed in the cities featured, so the Universalzeit indicates the actual time all year round, with no adjustment necessary. The hours are indicated by the hour hand; the minutes and seconds are indexed for all time zones via the minute and second hands. The lance-shaped hour and minute hands as well as steel hour indices are hand-crafted and have been painstakingly flat polished. The hours are set via the crown at 3 o'clock. When the minute hand passes 12, the time in the time windows jumps forward by an hour. Powering the watch is a manual winding movement with power reserve of 42 hours when fully wound.

Price: S$76,500