Hublot launches two watches that show off every colour, everywhere, all at once

One would expect a spectrum of coloured gemstones on women’s jewellery watches (which tend to be more jewellery than watch), but it wasn’t until Rolex released a rainbow-hued, sapphire-studded bezel on its Cosmograph Daytona in 2012 that the aesthetic really took off for serious watch collectors. Since then, the rainbow watch trend has been igniting the industry with joyous palettes, with offerings from the likes of Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet, Ulysse Nardin, H Moser and more delighting customers in 2022 alone.

Arguably the most naturally inclined to the trend is Hublot, a brand that has shown repeatedly that anything worth doing is worth overdoing — not in terms of excess but through inventive variations. Hublot has used rainbow hues on leather straps, bezels, gold cases, carbon fibre cases, numerals, sub dials, whole dials, and even on moving parts like the spinning flower of the Classic Fusion Takashi Murakami Sapphire Rainbow 45mm in 2021. That was also the year it extended the use of rainbow stones all the way to the bracelet with the Big Bang Integrated Tourbillon Rainbow.

That dizzying saturation of sparkle and colour is back this year with the release of the Big Bang Unico Integrated Rainbow and Big Bang Integrated Time Only Rainbow, first unveiled at LVMH Watch Week earlier this year. Rubies, amethysts, blue topazes, tsavorites, as well as pink, orange, blue and yellow sapphires have been set in the bezel, case and bracelet in fulsome amounts — 942 for the Big Bang Unico Integrated Rainbow and 924 for the Big Bang Integrated Time Only Rainbow, to be exact. Unlike the Integrated Tourbillon Rainbow, which used only baguette-cut stones, these two models feature baguette-cut stones on the bezel, and round-cut ones for the bracelet. The effect is (just slightly) subtler, allowing more of Hublot’s King Gold — a rosier red gold alloy developed by the brand — to shine through.

Such cheerful effervescence comes from toilsome work, not just from the time it takes to set all the stones at the exact same height and angle but also from sourcing them. The stones have to be fastidiously selected for colour and size in order to achieve a smooth gradation from the bezel to the lugs and then each individual link. For both watches, the indexes are coloured to match the bezel, while the hands remain white. Legibility isn’t an issue as they pop against black, open-worked movements. For the Big Bang Unico Integrated Rainbow, that would be the Unico MHUB1280 self-winding column wheel chronograph movement with a power reserve of three days, while the Big Bang Integrated Time Only Rainbow is powered by the automatic MHUB1710 which, despite the watch name, offers a date display at 6 o’clock. It has a power reserve of 50 hours, water resistance of 100m and a surprisingly slim profile of 9.25mm.

Hublot only joined in the rainbow fun in 2017, but it did so with a brightly coloured bezel in a then-trending sapphire crystal case, so the brand certainly knows how to make bold statements. And now with either of these dazzling watches on your wrist, so can you.