The Cartier Santos Skeleton reveals its colourful side
Soothing tones in coloured lacquer and PVD refreshes this classic icon for the younger audience.
LUXURY watches are getting more colourful in recent years as watchmakers and designers tap into all colours of the rainbow for their next collections.
Blue, green, red, salmon pink, yellow, and even purple took turns dominating the haute horlogerie scene, and this trend shows no sign of fading just yet.
Fanning the flames of this red-hot trend are this year’s new Santos timepieces by Cartier which plays with colour in creative and unexpected ways.
Colour adorns the new Santos de Cartier skeleton models for the first time.
Here, the maison’s famous Calibre 9612 MC with bridges cleverly designed as Roman numerals offer a strikingly different aesthetic than the classic Santos de Cartier.
Underscoring Cartier’s immense depth as a design maison and its inextinguishable wealth of creativity, this trio of timepieces plays with colour, uses them to highlight key features of the watch, and even to create an optical illusion.
A NEWSLETTER FOR YOU
Friday, 2 pm
Lifestyle
Our picks of the latest dining, travel and leisure options to treat yourself.
Those on the hunt for the next green watch will love what Cartier has done with the skeletonised Santos.
Elegant Roman numerals painted with a verdant green lacquer just barely obscuring the movement mechanism beneath, a seven-sided crown set with an ornamental green jasper, and a nifty QuickSwitch interchangeable steel bracelet that you can easily swap out for a leather strap in matching hue.
Then there is the grey model which comes with grey lacquer instead of green, but there’s an additional feature unique to this piece. Its flanks are coated with black ADLC – a treatment that was introduced to fine watchmaking by Cartier in 2009.
The result is a sleek, gunmetal grey finish that highlights the Santos’ fluid, seamless curves flowing from lug to lug.
Keeping with the grey colour theme is a crown gem-set with a facetted grey spinel and a grey leather strap also exchangeable with the QuickSwitch steel bracelet.
Lastly, the final Santos de Cartier Skeleton raises the stakes by incorporating not just one but three different materials to create this next model in blue.
Once again the maison applied blue lacquer all over the Roman numerals and the crown is set with a signature blue sapphire crystal.
But then the bezel has been given a blue PVD coating which did the watch multiple favours by bringing out the hairline details of the vertical brushed surfaces below, and protecting the material from mild scratches.
Yet, even though the bezel is dressed in blue PVD, Cartier saw fit to leave the exposed screws in their original hue, exercising restraint and finesse with one minute gesture – such is the design ingenuity of Cartier.
Punctuating the bezel at all four corners, they continue down the QuickSwitch bracelet in twin rows, and here is also where you’ll discover the final flourish of this timepiece.
The stainless steel bracelet can be swapped out for another one made with links not of metal but dark blue rubber.
Offering the full flexibility of a bracelet as well as the comfort of natural rubber, it blends perfectly into the blue PVD bezel, giving the illusion that the watch is sleeker and even more streamlined than it already is.
Copyright SPH Media. All rights reserved.
