• Nice!

    Worse for me is the way the Black Bay line mixes round markers with the snowflake hands. It makes no sense from a design perspective. But clearly, it doesn’t bother most people!

    Could you elaborate on this perhaps? What would be the "correct" marker and hand combos for diving watches?

  • The snowflake hand is something Tudor revived from their vintage divers' watches. Originally Tudor used the Rolex layout with rectangles and dots, a triangle at 12, and Mercedes hands (and of course, actual Rolex cases and crowns).

    In the 60s they wanted to differentiate themselves as a brand, rather than "Rolexes with cheaper movements", and came up with the famous snowflake Submariner. They changed their logo to the shield shape they use now and totally rethought the hands and markers. Twelve is an isosceles triangle (more or less), 3/6/9 is rectangle that's twice as long as its width, and the intermediate hour markers are squares. So it's all very geometric and mostly based on squares, hence the hour and seconds hands (which became known as snowflake hands for some reason) using rotated squares as large lume shapes. It was quite a cool and modern design at the time.

    Modern Tudor have revived that basic design for the Pelagos line (although the triangle is a bit thinner than it should be), but they also just slapped the square hour hand on the more vintage styled Black Bay. Everything else on the Black Bay is aping the pre-Snowflake designs, except clearly Rolex have decided they don't want them to use a Mercedes hour hand anymore. So you end up with this odd collision of retro and modern.

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