Hublot’s all-sapphire timepiece

Hublot’s all-sapphire timepiece sheds a new light on its intricate movement

‘Sapphire crystal is a hard material, but at the same time it is also fragile,’ says Hublot CEO Ricardo Guadalupe, who has just unveiled the first Big Bang model featuring an integrated case and bracelet both crafted from the unyielding material. The Big Bang Integral Tourbillon Full Sapphire builds on foundations laid with an earlier model, 2016’s Big Bang Unico Sapphire, but this new limitededition piece goes one step further, integrating the case and the bracelet to create a streamlined silhouette, hitherto thought to be an impossible technical challenge. The watch is an elaborate puzzle of solid sapphire pieces, with 37 in the case alone – five of which are made solely from sapphire – and 165 parts in the bracelet, a third of these designed specifically to be flexible and comfortable against the wrist. Each sapphire crystal component was milled and polished in a risky process that only exposes imperfections upon completion, making errors expensive.

The result is a watch with bridges and movement plates that appear to hover in space. ‘The most complicated part was to work on a design with maximum transparency,’ says Guadalupe. ‘It is very difficult to precisely position the wheels in relation to each other. We had to add brass plugs [which contain the watchmaking rubies] glued to the sapphire bridges. This is a real challenge for production.’ *