De Bethune’s DB25 Starry Varius Aérolite Is A Watch Out Of This World

By Gabriel Pessoa July 27, 2022

The DB25 Starry Varius Aérolite from De Bethune is the extremely exclusive timepiece crafted from a meteorite.

Photo Credit: De Bethune

De Bethune enriched the watch’s dial with a starry sky emblematic of the timeless materials of the cosmos.

“The cosmos, time, the sky… when you want to see time evolve and you have no instruments, you observe the sky. This is one of the recurring themes in watchmaking,” explains Denis Flageollet, Master Watchmaker and creator of De Bethune. Constantly in search of innovation, it is in the diversity and simplicity of nature that De Bethune carves its most beautiful creations.

De Bethune has previously used ferrous meteorites, most notably, to create one of the cases of the famous Dream Watch 5, the dial of the DB28 Kind of Blue Meteorite and lately with the dial of the DB28XP Météorite. Denis Flageollet nurtures his deep passion for meteorites by regularly trialling iron ore reduction processes with a view to one day making his own metal. His deep-felt interest in the material and his numerous attempts with Russian and Egyptian meteorites have led the Maison to work with a new kind of meteorite: Muonionalusta Meteorite.

Photo Credit: De Bethune

The dial of the DB25 Starry Varius Aérolite is adorned with an ancestral stone forged in space. A metal alloy that endows the dial with a distinctive texture, along with geometrical patterns aligned in a precise way that makes each timepiece special and unique.

Taking up the graphic codes of the Manufacture, the new reference features a Roman numeral hour circle and an Arabic numeral minute track on a silvered disc, complemented by hand-polished steel hands identical to those already featured on the dial of the DB25 Starry Varius.

Photo Credit: De Bethune

Based on the tourbillon that Abraham- Louis Breguet invented for his 18th century pocket watches, De Bethune has sought to optimize it on today’s wristwatches. To do so, the Maison sought out to be more efficient on a wrist engaged in rapid and disordered movements, the tourbillon must have the highest possible frequency and fastest rotation speed. In creating a titanium and silicon tourbillon with a frequency of 36,000 vibrations per hour, an extraordinarily light carriage (0.18 grams, the lightest ever created in the industry) spinning on its axis every 30 seconds, comprising a total of 63 components (the lightest of which weighs less than 0.0001 grams), this feat is easier to describe than to achieve.

The 42mm-diameter watch is equipped with the mechanical manual-winding DB2109V4 caliber, entirely designed, developed and produced within the De Bethune workshops in L’Auberson, Switzerland.

The DB25 Starry Varius Aérolite will be limited to a production of five pieces per year.