Editor’s Note: Watches & Wonders (formerly SIHH) and Baselworld 2020 are canceled but that hasn’t stopped watch brands large and small from debuting their new wares. To stay on top of this year’s best new watch releases, visit our tag page.
H. Moser & Cie is a Swiss watch brand famous for doing, well, whatever the hell they want, like making a watch out of cheese. (No, really — these guys love to poke fun at their own industry.) They also make utterly incredible complicated watches such as this moon phase and this funky chronograph. And this bonkers Flying Hours.
So given all this haute horlogerie, you wouldn’t be remiss to think that maison’s latest three SKUs are perhaps a bit…tame by comparison. But the devil’s in the details, so to speak, and the details here are…black. Like, really, really black.
Moser has made use of Vantablack, “blackest black ever produced by artificial means,” in three new models. What does “blackest black ever” mean, exactly? Because I never made it to high school physics (I was too busy playing the saxophone at the time), I’m just going to quote Moser here: “It is composed of carbon nanotubes that are 10,000 times finer than a human hair, aligned vertically alongside each other. When a photon hits Vantablack, this material absorbs 99.965% of the light. As our eyes need reflected light to perceive what we are looking at, Vantablack is perceived as the absence of matter, a black hole.”
Holy shit, a black hole. In a watch. What? You’re wearing a black hole!
Anyway, back to new watches. The new Venturer Vantablack® Black Hands is available in two different case diameters: 39mm in white gold, and 43mm in steel. There’s also a new DLC-coated steel Endeavour Tourbillon Vantablack® Black Hands model, for those of you who like antiquated carryover pocket watch technology in your wristwatches. And as is typically the case when Moser does their minimalist thing, these watches look good — all dial, very little in the way of ostentation or ornamentation, and great proportions. (Certainly all three, despite blacked-out handsets, are more legible than the April Fool’s Day model the brand posted on Instagram.)
