Bulgari Lets Its Octo Finissimo S Case Shine With Bare Metal Watch

Bulgari has gone to town on its Octo Finissimo in recent years, producing everything from architectural collaborations to a convention shattering carbon fiber minute repeater while breaking all manner of records for ultra-thin watchmaking in the process.

Now Bulgari is doing something that it hasn’t done before, letting the unmistakable Octo Finissimo case shape take center stage without so much as a black dial or contrasting hour markers to distract you. It’s the horological equivalent of a celebrity makeup-free reveal.

The closest the brand has come before was the trilogy of sandblasted gold, steel and titanium Octos but honestly, the sandblasted finish and the multitude of layers of plating used to achieve the desired shades were absolutely distracting enough to take the focus off of one of watchmaking’s most complex cases, one Bulgari acquired when it bought famed watch designer Gérald Genta’s eponymous brand from Singaporean retailer The Hour Glass in 2000.

Here the Octo Finissimo stands proud, with nothing to hide behind, in satin-brushed stainless steel case and bracelet, a radially brushed stainless steel bezel and a vertically brushed ‘silvered’ dial which, while not steel, has been color-matched to the rest of the watch. The only variation here is the direction of the brush marks left in the metal, it’s brave and very effective.

Inside this comparatively simple 40mm Octo Finissimo S Steel Silvered Dial beats the BVL 138, which uses a platinum micro-rotor and, at just 2.23mm thick, is still the world’s thinnest automatic movement but the watch itself is still practical, with 100m of water resistance.

The watch is available now priced at $12,000 USD but for more information head over to Bulgari.

Elsewhere in watches, Hublot adds three new shades to its Big Bang Integral Ceramic watch.