If you’re going to spend a princely sum on a timepiece, you in all probability need one thing huge, heavy, and complex that gained’t go unnoticed in your wrist. Which is why the brand new Bulgari Octo Finissimo Ultra is such an odd duck. It’s engineered to vanish in your wrist. The matte grey arm chronometer simply claimed the document for the world’s thinnest mechanical watch.

Like digital digital camera megapixels, vehicular horsepower, or the variety of polygons a recreation console can render on display screen in actual time, there’s an ongoing warfare amongst luxurious watchmakers on the subject of making mechanical wristwatches. Unlike megapixels and horsepower and polygons, which go up, watchmakers are attempting to pack a watch into as few millimeters as potential. That document was held by Piaget, whose Altiplano Ultimate Concept watch impressed the horological neighborhood again in 2018 with a thickness of simply two millimeters. Four years later, Bulgari has snatched that crown from Piaget’s head with its new Octo Finissimo Ultra, which measures simply 1.88 mm thick. For comparability, a typical US quarter is 1.75 mm, and two stacked bank cards is available in at 1.52 mm.

Unlike the Piaget Altiplano Ultimate Concept, which was, because the identify implies, only a idea and too frail to be worn and used daily, Bulgari is definitely producing 10 of the Octo Finissimo Ultras, which embrace a extremely seen QR code on the face that hyperlinks to NFT artworks supposed for use as authentication for each bit.

To shrink the whole lot down that skinny, Bulgari’s watchmakers needed to combine all the Octo Finissimo Ultra’s 170 elements into the watch’s case as an alternative of putting in the mechanical components one after the other. To make the timepiece robust sufficient to not bend and flex like a bank card, its 40 mm-wide case is made out of sandblasted titanium, whereas the again is made out of tungsten carbide: a cloth that’s additionally used to make industrial drill bits.

Unlike a extra conventional, perpendicularly mounted crown on the aspect of the watch, the wearer adjusts the time and winds the spring that powers the mechanical motion with two equally skinny thumbwheels positioned on both aspect. On a full wind, the Octo Finissimo Ultra has a 50 hour energy reserve.

And consider it or not, even with a price ticket of round $440,000 (€400,000), Bulgari will in all probability don’t have any hassle promoting each final one.