Here at Helicon, we wait until we get everything just right before we release a watch. We are proud to be a husband and wife team, small and independent. And now we have the great pleasure of introducing you to our first release for 2023, ‘The Blue Hour’.
We see inspiration in the World all around us and marvel at the breathtaking beauty of our planet. In this special watch, we capture the exquisite beauty of The Blue Hour; the period at twilight when the sun dips below the horizon creating a vibrant blue sky together with the last orange light of the sun.
Creating this stunning natural phenomenon on a watch but with real depth and beauty, took months. It remains to this day, one of our most difficult dials to create. Using our years of design experience within the watch industry, we were able to create a brief to translate our vision into reality. Within our excellent network of specialists, we are fortunate to work with amazing artisans with years of knowledge and know-how and luckily we found just the right person to bring our vision to life; Amy. It was only with her hours of painstaking research and sampling that we were able finally to create our truly individual dial.
The colour and treatment for the dial had to be exact. Once we found just the right blue and the perfect orange, we settled on the vision for our dial. A beautiful blue is matched to a soft polychromatic orange, which adds a beautiful 3-dimensional shimmer.
Each dial is finished by hand, which means that The Blue Hour fade or ‘ombre’ effect is unique to each watch, making every single watch truly unique.
The Blue Hour also features our first blue ceramic bezel insert. The choice of coloured ceramic is actually very limited and hard to source. It took us nearly a year of constant sample matching to our exact colour reference with our ceramic specialist until we found a wonderful mid-blue that perfectly complements our unique dial. It blends beautifully.
The Helicon Master offers a quintessential vintage look whilst still being entirely fit for purpose, meaning it is highly legible and comfortable. The wearable 38.5mm diameter case is made from top-grade 316L stainless steel and is topped with a domed sapphire crystal to ensure water resistance down to 200 metres.
Inside, a bespoke IPS-plated inner case (or ‘Faraday cage’) ensures a high degree of magnetic resistance and also offers additional shock protection to the highly accurate Seiko-manufactured automatic movement. We also have our own custom-designed roulette date wheel.
The 120-click unidirectional bezel features a scratch-resistant ceramic insert. Its markings are highlighted with Swiss C3 Superluminova to ensure visibility in even the murkiest of conditions. The Blue Hour’s dial is complemented by our own hand-finishing with applied indices and matching hands, all generously filled with Swiss C3 Superluminova. The watch is supplied with our own brushed and polished 316L stainless steel bracelet with dive extension, fold-over safety clasp, micro adjustment and push-button release. Every Helicon watch is supplied with our own hard shell nylon travel case, great for all your accessories when not protecting your watch.
There will only ever be 50 pieces made and this fact makes our Helicon Master Blue Hour a truly collectable example of the watchmaker's skill.
