As one of the founding brands of Geneva Watch Days (GWD), Ulysse Nardin has always brought its some of its best launches of the year to the summer event in the city of watchmaking. This year, Ulysse Nardin brought more than watches to GWD — it brought the rainbow! Two new models, the Blast Rainbow and Lady Diver Rainbow, represent the brand’s adventures in the realm of colour.
The Ulysse Nardin Blast was launched in 2020, with the Sparkling Blast symbolising the brand’s reputation for disrupting traditional watchmaking. Its irregularly faceted diamonds (inspired by the asymmetric design of stealth aircraft) fractured the reflection and refraction of light in a way that distinguished it from the more familiar brilliant-set or baguette-set pieces. With the Blast Rainbow and Lady Diver Rainbow, light is fractured in a different way, not through scattering via the precisely cut diamonds, but separated into its component hues through the use of coloured gems.
The trend of setting watches with a range of stones to correspond with the colours of the rainbow is not new by any means, but for Ulysse Nardin, these watches are a natural continuation of the aesthetic established by their use of silicon components.
Because of the oxidation treatment given to silicon components to make them suitable for use in watchmaking (a process in which Ulysse Nardin was an industry pioneer), components such as the anchor and escape wheel take on a blue or purple iridescent effect. The Blast Rainbow and Lady Diver Rainbow have expanded upon this theme of iridescence, including intensely pigmented shades in their selected gems that belong more to the realm of this polychromatic phenomenon rather than the straightforward colours that we associate with representations of the rainbow.
The bezel of the Blast Rainbow is set exclusively with prestigious gems such as ruby (red) and sapphire (pink, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple), while the two versions of the Lady Diver play with a variety of semi-precious stones such as tsavorite (green), peridot (light green), topaz (sky-blue), aquamarine (light blue) and amethyst (violet), in addition to ruby and sapphire.
In keeping with the sporty nature of these two releases, the Blast Rainbow and Lady Diver are paired with black rubber straps. The brilliance of the stones is perfectly complemented by black DLC-coated cases, although the Lady Diver Rainbow also comes in a stainless-steel version on white rubber strap, offering more choice to those who prefer this feminine (though equally dynamic) expression of Ulysse Nardin watchmaking.
