G-Shock are celebrating 40 years with two special commemorative models in a new and unique colourway, Flare Red. The base models for this colourway are the MT-G and the Mudmaster. While your love or hate of these watches will depend on whether you like the new colour, but the process used to reach them is quite interesting.
The Flare Red colourway is supposed to suggest the expression of a solar flare from our sun. You can see this effectively evoked in the bezel; however, you could also interpret it as a tortoise shell pattern.
The multi-coloured carbon insert bezel is a further developed multi-coloured stripe pattern used in many other G-Shocks but this time they’ve created a new mould with 3D undulations. The process goes a little something like this: Carbon and glass fibre sheets are laminated in a regular pattern. These are then pressed and distorted, cut flat, and voila! You have the solar flare pattern.
The real neat thing here is that parts of the bezel are luminescent. This is another new design technique achieved by mixing luminescent particles into one of the glass fibre sheets. The luminescence has been achieved without sacrificing shock resistance which took a lot of trial and error. To balance looks and performance Casio controlled the particle size and the amount of luminescent material to ensure that an even distribution was achieved.
A nice subtle touch is the use of pink gold IP on the bezel ring and rose gold IP on the push buttons and crown. It’s a really nice addition, but again it gives off retro-1960s tortoise shell vibes rather than solar flare, but either way it looks good. Casio even stressed the subtle difference between pink gold and rose gold, but that’s for someone with a sharper eye to disseminate.
The technology used to create G-Shocks is getting more complicated so even the design team in charge of the colour development have to be familiar with the manufacturing process. So now, both teams, design and manufacturing, have to work together to produce colours. It’s something to be appreciated, and for a 40th anniversary, Casio are still managing to find interesting ways to produce watches.
The MT-G is going for $1,300 AUD and the Mudmaster at $1,100 AUD.
