Orient Star's 75th anniversary flagship is a hand-wound skeleton limited to 130 pieces

Orient Star has unveiled the Skeleton RE-BR0001N, the flagship of its 75th anniversary celebrations, which have already included the M34 F8 Skeleton Hand Winding and the M34 F8 Date Meteorite. It is a hand-wound, highly limited series of 130 pieces priced at ¥1,100,000, roughly €6,150 at publication. The official European or American price has not been disclosed.

The brand behind it

Orient Star is the high-end side of Orient, the Japanese watchmaker owned by Seiko Epson Corporation. The brand has made skeleton watches before, beginning with the 1991 Mon Bijou and running through the M45 F8 Skeleton Hand Winding of 2021 and the recent M34 F8 Skeleton.

Case and crystal

The new model goes further than either in decoration and mechanical ambition. The case measures 40mm in diameter and just 9.5mm thick, with boldly contoured lugs finished with brushed flanks and mirror-polished surfaces executed through Sallaz, or Zaratsu, polishing.

A sapphire crystal with Super-Anti-Reflective coating cuts light reflection by a claimed 99%, keeping every facet of the new movement clearly visible from the front. A sapphire back shows the other side. Water resistance is stated at a rather low 30 meters.

The dial is dominated by the openworked movement and its curves, laid out like ripples spreading through a Japanese Zen garden in a three-tiered structure of overlapping circles. Rounded openings are paired with hand-inked lines on the bridges, and time is read on openworked, blue-tempered hands.

A small seconds is at six o'clock with hacking, and a power reserve indicator at twelve. The watch also carries the longest reserve Orient has ever fitted, rated at over 72 hours. That outlasts the 68 hours we found on the LIV Gravel 001 Automatic in our field watch ranking.

The movement

The calibre F9B82 is a hand-wound movement with 20 jewels and a 4Hz frequency. It adds a silicon escape wheel, still rare in Japanese watches, with an optimised, patented geometry meant to raise efficiency. Decoration includes diamond-cut, mirror-finished chamfering and hand-applied hairline finishing.

Blued screws complete the movement work. The strap is goatskin, first vegetable-tanned with natural plant-derived tannins, then finished in the traditional Japanese Chari Happo technique of hand-massaging in all directions: vertical, horizontal and diagonal.

A trifold deployant buckle with push buttons closes the strap. The package includes a dedicated presentation box, a 10-year warranty and three complimentary overhaul services during that period, covering disassembly, cleaning, reassembly, lubrication, gasket replacement and water-resistance testing.

Orient pitches the watch as the finest expression of mechanical expertise at an integrated manufacture. The skeleton structure is shaped entirely by the new in-house movement, rather than applied to an existing calibre, and the decoration is more advanced than the brand usually offers.

The 40mm size and 9.5mm profile put it in dressy, flat-silhouette company rather than sports territory. In our ranking of the best luxury watch brands we judge on heritage, in-house movement-making, value retention and design language, and this reference leans hard on the first two.

Orient Star's parent Seiko is a name we already cover in our watches jewelry section, and the anniversary skeleton sits several rungs above the Bambino and Mako collections most buyers picture when they think of Orient. This is the refinements those affordable lines point toward.

At 130 pieces the series is deliberately small for a brand that usually sells in volume, and the ten-year warranty with three free services signals confidence in a movement built to be shown rather than hidden. Nothing in the announcement gives a date for European or US deliveries.

The ¥1,100,000 asking price lands roughly level with a steel Cartier Tank Must in our Tank alternatives guide, though for a very different watch. Where that guide tests rectangular dress cases against the Cartier original, the Orient Star is a round, openworked showcase of Japanese movement finishing.

For the Seiko family, the silicon escape wheel is the quiet headline. Our coverage of independent and accessible horology has long noted the feature as a European specialty; its appearance here, with patented geometry, is a sign of how far Orient's high-end arm has moved on its 75th year.

The three-tiered overlap of circles is the visual signature, and it is what separates this from the M34 and M45 skeletons that came before. Each level sits at a different depth, so the movement reads as layered architecture rather than a single cut-out plane.

The hand-inked lines on the bridges complete that effect, giving the steel a drawn, almost calligraphic quality against the polished chamfers. Blue-tempered hands were chosen so the time still jumps out from the openworked movement behind them.

Details remain available through Orient-Watch.com.