These Watches Aren’t Afraid of the Dark

The watches:

• Bell & Ross’s BR V2-94 Full Lum
• Mühle Glashütte’s S.A.R. Rescue-Timer
• Christopher Ward’s C1 Worldglow

The single best thing about these watches: Over the last year, watches seem to have departed fully from the black-and-white age and entered the technicolor era: it didn’t take more than a couple of months from the industry to hop from its obsession with red to green (or lime). Color is in. These watches fully coated with Super-Luminova are pushing the color conversation even further, though. Because what’s more fun than a green watch? A green watch that glows in the dark. Christopher Ward takes the tried-and-true idea of a world timer watch but uses the globe as a can’t-miss luminescent showstopper. Mühle Glashütte has an excuse for being extra (not that it needs one): the watch is purposefully built for those manning sea rescue boats who need to keep the lights low to spot things at sea after the sun’s gone down. That’s not a problem with this glowing timepiece. More likely, this watch will come in handy though when a buddy needs to spot you at a bar or a concert when we’re finally going back to those. Now that’s useful functionality.

The backstory: Plenty of watches use glow-in-the-dark materials, but the road to get here was long and winding. The original Rolex GMT-Master IIs had bezels made out of bakelite that featured numerals painted with radium, so they’d glow in dim cockpits. The bakelite was brittle and prone to cracking, which was bad. Even worse, the radium was...radioactive. Rolex recalled those pieces so they could be tested by a body known as the Atomic Energy Commission. (Naturally, the fact that many people heeded the recall makes good-condition examples of the piece extremely valuable. If you ever show up to a watch club meeting and someone pulls out a Geiger counter to measure radiation, you know there’s some good shit afoot.)

And Rolex wasn’t the only radioactive brand During WWI, female factory employees painting dials of clocks and watches with radium were told the glow-in-the-dark paint was safe—and were instructed to get their paint brushes to a point by licking them. In doing so they ingested deadly amounts of the material—with some even painting their nails and faces for fun. Many of the “Radium Girls,” as they’re now known, fell severely ill or died.

Fortunately, the watch industry has since pivoted to the much safer Super-Luminova, which was invented in 1993. Super-Luminova is now the standard material for any brand that wants to turn its pieces into a night light. And while Super-Luminova has been used in the industry for decades, it’s mainly confined to numerals and hands—much like the original radioactive GMTs from the ‘50s. However, Bell & Ross, Mühle Glashütte, and Christopher Ward make the most of the material by slathering it across the dial and turning average watches into funky, glowing specimens.

Where and when to buy them: All the pieces are available now on each brand’s respective website: Bell & Ross’s BR V2-94 Full Lum ($5,100) Mühle Glashütte’s S.A.R. Rescue-Timer ($2,399), and Christopher Ward’s C1 Worldglow ($1,995).