Bulgari celebrates the 10th anniversary of its award-winning Octo collection with the Italian maison’s eight world record, the thinnest mechanical watch ever produced. Meet the 1.8-mm thick Octo Finissimo Ultra (Ref. 103611):

1.80 mm for the watch as a whole, from the caseback to the top of the sapphire crystal. That’s exactly half the height of an ETA 2829-A2 automatic movement, and it is an impressive 0.2 mm thinner than the previous record holder, the Piaget Altiplano Ultimate Concept watch from 2018.

To create the world’s thinnest, and at the same time still reliable and robust mechanical watch, the designers, engineers and watchmakers had to start from scratch: the indications for the hours, minutes and seconds all had to be executed separately to reduce height, for example. The off-centered seconds display ? a signature element of the collection ? on the wheel at 6 o’clock, is placed next to the two regulator-type counters for the hours (top) and minutes (lower half). More importantly, the Octo Finissimo Ultra uses the caseback as a mainplate on which the 170 components of the BVL Calibre 180 are integrated. The movement itself offers a 50-hour power reserve.
Another issue was the overall rigidity required, which was achieved by combining the case middle, bezel and titanium lugs with a caseback/mainplate element in tungsten carbide, a particularly dense, hard and ultra-resistant combination of carbon and tungsten. Instead ...