The HM6 Alien Nation is a full-sapphire limited edition upgrade on the “normal” HM6 – and comes with a crew of little gold men to boot
By Chris Hall

Oh MB&F, how we enjoy your whimsical ways. Through founder Max Busser’s infatuation with classic sci-fi, and aversion to typical watch construction, the Horological Machines series has given us a wildly varied series of watches. (Busser famously said when he started out more than a decade ago that he would never make a round watch; when he U-turned on that pledge it was to create the Legacy Machine series that now sits in our Modern Classic series of designs).
The HM line is the real core of the brand’s creative identity, experimenting with designs inspired by frog-eyed monsters or 1970s sports cars. In more recent years MB&F has given more attention to the world of science fiction, creating rocket ship and robot clocks, as well as of course HM6, which we wrote about here when it came out in 2014. That was updated in 2016 in the form of HM6 SV, which replaced the bulk of the titanium case with sapphire crystal.
HM6 SV was not the brand’s first foray into the world of oddly-shaped sapphire windows, but it was its most elaborate to date. Now the team has taken the idea to its logical conclusion and stripped out even the small amounts of metal that were left on the case, creating this version with an entirely sapphire case. That’s not easy – joining sapphire to me...