So what’s an energy-saving alternative that will look hip, colorful, and futuristic on your wrist? It’s designer David Blanc’s Elusive watch that’s still quite elusive nowadays, considering that it’s not actually being manufactured yet.

Here’s another possible reason why the watch was named like so: the watch’s face is also elusive. That’s because it doesn’t have a face – just a hole where a face is supposed to be. This is where the battery-saving stuff comes in.

Instead of displaying the time on a LED or LCD 24/7 or having two hands running across it at any given moment, you have to insert your finger into the face to have it displayed: one finger for the time, and two for the date. After it’s triggered, the time would be projected onto your skin using a tiny, harmless laser beam. Pretty neat concept, eh?

[via Yanko Design]

As you can see, the bezels were intentionally rusted, or, to use a fancy word, oxidized. A special coating has been applied to the bezels to prevent further rusting. Now the bezels in the limited limited edition Tourbillon Steampunk Ala Grande (Romain Jerome sure know how to name their products) are not only rusted, they’re “studded with 80 hand-applied rivets and have four bolts that resemble watertight hatches.”

I honestly think that honoring a notorious and deadly ship is questionable at the very least. Nonetheless, this is one kick ass watch with looks  that match its undisclosed yet no doubt titanic price tag. Only 9 Tourbillon Steampunk Ala Grande watches were made. Because there are only 9 people in the world who can afford the thing. Kidding.

A hundred years from now, Romain Jerome will be releasing the Recession Clusterfrack Ala Grande, watches with bits of concrete from the buildings of Circuit City, AIG and Lehman Brothers. Still kidding. I hope.

[via TFTS]

The website says that each watch is custom-made. That tells you right there it’s expensive. Next it talks about diamonds. Double cha-ching.

But what is the watch made from? On the website they claim that it’s “made from the strongest materials that man can make.” Soooo… what exactly would that be? The X-Men fan in me is thinking Admantium, but if that were the case why wouldn’t they just say it? Also, why doesn’t this watch have retractable claws that can cut through anything? That would definitely help make it superior in my book. But I digress.

This watch is the latest in the current timepiece trend that I describe as “let’s make a watch that doesn’t look like a watch with blinky lights that confusingly sort of tell you what time it is, sometimes.” Most people I know just use their cellphones to tell time and don’t even wear watches, so it’s unclear to me who is buying all of these crazy wrist-based timepieces, but if there’s a market for them then I should probably go glue-gun some LEDs and some claws to a lanyard and get into business.

[Kyle Cherry via Dvice]