What you see here is the most expensive TAG Heuer timepiece ever created. Called the TAG Heuer Carrera Plasma Tourbillon, the incredible watch with a jaw-dropping price tag of $376,000 debuted at the ongoing Watches and Wonders 2022 as a demonstrator timepiece created to showcase revolutionary materials innovation. The highlight of the unique timepiece is the extensive use of lab-grown diamonds in a manner that has never been witnessed in the watchmaking business before. The innovative timepiece features a lightweight 44mm case made from sandblasted black anodized aluminum. The case also gets a fixed black ceramic tachymeter bezel that blends well with the case finish. However, what makes the case truly unique is that it is embedded with 48 lab-grown diamonds.
If you think the case design with the embedded lab-grown diamonds is crazy, wait till you have a look at the crown. It’s a single piece of 2.5ct lab-grown diamond shaped like a crown, which is simply jaw-dropping. The benefit of artificially created diamonds is that they can be shaped according to exact needs, which is not possible in the case of naturally occurring diamonds.
Well, the Carrera Plasma Tourbillon gets more diamonds, just in case you were wondering. The watch is fitted with a sparkling dial with finely ground diamond “powder” that is blasted onto the surface creating what Tag Heuer calls a “polycrystalline diamond dial.” The chronograph subdials feature a darker tone to contrast the lighter tone of the rest of the dial. Furthermore, the dial gets white gold indices that are also adorned with lab-grown diamonds.
Housed inside the case is TAG Heuer’s in-house caliber Heuer 02 Tourbillon which is also known as the Heuer 02T. The automatic movement debuted in 2015 and has been updated over the years. The highlight of Heuer 02T is a proprietary carbon-based hairspring. Operating at 4Hz, the movement offers around 65 hours of power reserve. While TAG Heuer has only created a single piece of the Carrera Plasma Tourbillon for the Watches and Wonders trade show, the company’s CEO Frédéric Arnault has said that “more than one, but less than a dozen” examples will be made.
