A luxury encapsulation of post-Covid optimism.

When De Bethune's co-founder Denis Flageollet introduced the DB25 Starry Varius model three years ago, he must have contemplated how much demand there would be for its GMT function when the world came out of lockdown.

The watch equipped with an unconventionally constructed complication for globetrotters became a symbol of post-Covid optimism. The DB25GMT Starry Varius returns in a more luxurious incarnation this year. Polished titanium has been swapped for a rose-gold case, which really looks the part. It accentuates the GMT indication's configuration.

The microsphere completes a full rotation each time it reaches 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., symbolizing the transition from night to day and vice versa, where its sunny gold hemisphere contrasts with a nocturnal half made of blued steel. 

The sphere indicates the hour in a second time zone, traveling around a two-tone 24-hour GMT scale. The numerals for daytime hours are highlighted in a golden tone that contrasts with the dark numerals for the nighttime half of the scale.

Another interesting detail is that the numerals lose their colored fill at the transitional hours of 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. The DB25GMT Starry Varius which appeared in 2021 built on the ideas introduced on the 2016 DB25 World Traveller.

The World Traveller had a sunken microsphere that circled a central raised disk with the names of cities around the world. De Bethune moved away the first worldtimer towards more subtle GMT models, in order to accommodate the indication of two time zones in the DB Kind of Two Jumping GMT with the complexity of a flipping double dial in 2022.

The new DB25 Starry Varius can also trace its origins back to the 2018 model with an outstanding Milky Way on its blue sky dial. The latest DB25GMT Starry Varius also features a blued-titanium night sky punctuated with gold pins for stars. The DB25GMT Starry Varius has kept the same case size: a fairly universal 42 mm in diameter.

You can see De Bethune's delta-shaped bridge on the caseback, which forms part of the hand-wound DB2507 movement. Time can be set using the winding crown, while the date can be adjusted using a separate corrector at 6 o'clock.