Earlier this week, I imagined what the reaction of the watch world would be if a massive brand like Rolex made a watch that told the time backward. My first thought was that the vast majority of the watch world would find the whole thing hilarious and ridiculous. But when Cartier does it, it’s just Cartier being clever and funny. There are plenty of great things about Cartier, but two of the best things are the brand’s history and its irreverence for it. high quality replica watches
Okay, irreverence is a strong word, but with the Santos-Dumont, we’re talking about what’s widely considered the first commercially-available men’s dress watch, which dates back to 1904. In recent years, the Santos-Dumont has seen a resurgence with a number of lacquer-heavy versions of what has become an iconic, rounded-square case shape. My favorite, to this day, is probably the version with a black lacquer dial and bezel that came out in 2022. That watch features the 430 MC movement, which is technically a Piaget 430 MC ultra-thin movement that measures 20.5 mm by 2.1 mm tall and allows for the Santos-Dumont’s 31.4mm diameter by 43.5mm length by 7.3mm height super thin, wearable, but not-too-small case.

Actually, everything above (when it comes to movement and case dimensions) is the same on the new Santos-Dumont Rewind. The dial is now in a carnelian red lacquer that has a kind of smoky and swirly texture. Oh and, well, it tells the time backwards.
If you read the Roman numerals on the dial clockwise it goes from 12 at the top, to 11, then 10, and so on. If you have to call it a gimmick, sure, you’re not wrong. But it’s also surprisingly packaged in a way that makes you kind of have to take it seriously. I mean a $38,400 platinum-cased Cartier has to be serious, right? Well maybe, maybe not.

If you’ve ever worn a 24-hour watch, you know how confusing it can be to glance at the dial for the first few hours (or even days) and have to reset your brain to where the hours are. Sure, the minutes are straightforward, but when noon is at 6 o’clock on the dial, you can easily get all kinds of turned around. Now, Cartier has a watch where the minutes are anything but straightforward, and I’m not quite sure how long it would take you to tell the time consistently. It reminds me of a YouTube video where an engineer made a bike where the handlebars operated in the opposite direction. It took a long time to unlearn how to ride the bike the way he had all his life and once he did, he couldn’t immediately go back to a normal bicycle. high quality replica watches
I would imagine that would be the way things would go if you wore the Rewind consistently for a while. Eventually, your brain would do a sort of “soft reset” and end up learning how to read the watch. But the moment you took the Cartier Rewind off, you’d either struggle to tell the time on a normal watch or quickly lose all the progress you made “learning” the Rewind.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) this will be a problem for only 200 people, as that’s the number of watches they’re making of this limited edition. As for the Cartier 430 MC movement, this time, the movement stays but the mechanism has been reversed, so everything operates backwards. It’s a completely unnecessary thing, but in a world of unnecessary things, a fun one like this is hard to complain about. The watch has a closed caseback, so you can’t watch the whole thing run in reverse, but that’s okay. The action is on the front. The crown (with ruby cabochon signifying the platinum case) is still in the same place, as well. Would I buy it? It certainly wears incredibly comfortably on the wrist, but so do other Santos-Dumonts of the same dimensions. With that in mind, I’m still hoping to luck into one of those black lacquer Santos-Dumonts that continue to be hard to get. This is certainly a watch for someone who either has a wild sense of taste and style or someone who already has a lot of other things in their watch box. But if I ever see one on the wrist of someone in the wild, I’ll immediately know they’re someone fun and forward-thinking, even if their watch is running backwards. high quality replica watches