At the Geneva Watch Days event in late August, best copy Ulysse Nardin unveiled a new collection called Blast. The collection featured timepieces with a new, self-winding, skeletonized caliber with a flying tourbillon; a multifaceted case design inspired by the lines of stealth aircraft; and a new “one-click” folding clasp. A week later, Ulysse Nardin introduced another Blast reference, positioned as a high-end jewelry timepiece, whose openworked, automatic tourbillon movement, as well as its case, are embellished with geometrically-cut diamonds in a motif reminiscent of a mosaic.
The new Sparkling Blast is limited to three pieces and has a 45-mm-diameter, white-gold case, with either a white-colored rubber strap or a deep blue-colored alligator strap. Each watch is adorned with a total of 211 hand-faceted diamonds across the case, crown, bezel, indexes, and hands; 85 of those diamonds are uniquely cut, giving the timepiece a total weight of 13 carats. The X-shaped cage on the openworked dial is also set with an array of diamonds, directly embedded into the architecture of this “shape-within-shape-within-shape” of the watch face, to highlight the large “X” framed inside the rectangle, itself framed inside the circle of the bezel.
The X-shaped cage on the openworked dial is set with an array of diamonds.
Swiss replica Ulysse Nardin says that the design of the case middle and its distinctive triple lugs borrows its “aligned edges and serrated triangular patterns” from the silhouettes of the wings found on stealth fighter jets, which make them invisible to radar and radio waves.
Each case, crown, bezel and index is adorned with hand-faceted diamonds; the watch has 211 diamonds in all.
The diamonds are set using an “invisible setting” technique that originated in France 200 years ago. In this setting, the diamonds are held in place by a hidden structure, which creates a floating appearance inside the metal ring but is invisible from the surface.
The self-deploying buckle is adorned with 1.22k of diamonds.
Like the Executive Skeleton Tourbillon and the other Blast models that preceded it (you can read more on the tourbillon, here), the new Sparkling Blast reference is powered by the skeletonized Caliber UN-172. This movement is an upgraded version of cheap fake Ulysse Nardin’s existing Caliber 171, updated to feature a platinum micro-rotor, visible from the front at 12 o’clock, which is the silicon mainspring’s source of power, automatically winding it to amass a power-reserve up to three days (72 hours). Inside the movement is a 2.5-Hz silicon flying automatic tourbillon. Of the movement’s 137 components, 23 of them belong to the tourbillon.