HYT Watches unveiled the first pictures of its new Skull Watch series last week and the reaction online has been mixed to say the least.
The Skull Watch
As you can see in the pictures the Skull Watch is aptly named, with a large skull taking centre stage on the dial. It’s sort of a modern day memento mori (Latin for “remember you are mortal”), a reminder of sorts that you wear to encourage you to cultivate detachment from the material life, a practice popular with Romans (although in this instance the ideal and the execution are somewhat contradictory I must say.)
This is of course not the first time we’ve seen something like this in a high-end luxury watch. Other brands have successfully incorporated skulls into their dials in the past (think Richard Mille and Bell & Ross for example) and HYT has done a good job of coming up with a fairly original way of doing it themselves.
For me the HYT Skull watch is cool in a comic book sort of way and there is no denying that it has been extremely well executed. Plus it has the added bonus of incorporating HYT’s proprietary liquid time display to really help set it apart from other skull watches on the market. Whether it has the unique appeal of the H1 and H2 to really attract potential buyers’ attention though remains to be seen.
Presented in the familiar 45mm case, the Skull watches will be offered in two versions; one will be in DLC black titanium with green liquid (“Skull Green Eye”) and the other rose gold + DLC black titanium with red liquid (“Skull Red Eye”). For some reason the latter really reminds me of Iron Man, so perhaps we will see one on Tony Stark’s wrist in the next Avengers movie (although I don’t think JLC would be too happy about that.)
Interestingly the Skull watch doesn’t display the minutes, only the hours which are shown on the outer chapter ring. You can probably roughly gauge the minutes based on where the liquid is at between the two hour markers however it would’ve been helpful if HYT added in some additional indices between the main hour markers, even if just at 15 minute intervals.
Arguably though this would have detracted from the clean look of the dial so maybe it’s for the best. Plus I’m guessing if you’re rocking a timepiece like this you’re not too worried about what the exact time is at any given point. A tinted sapphire case back in matching color finishes the unusual look of the Skull watch.
Stay tuned for updates on availability and pricing.
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