Night Light, White Light: The MING 37.02 Minimalist With ‘Polar White’ Lume

One of the most distinguishing characteristics of the watches made by MING is the use of luminous materials not just for the purposes of legibility (which is still the primary reason lume is used on watch dials) but as a design element, and as part of MING’s larger obsession with optical effects. This includes the use of inversion effects, in which different layers of the watches can appear transparent, translucent, or opaque depending on the amount and angle of light. MING launched its first watch in 2017 – the 17.01 – which introduced many of the design elements still used in MING watches today, and since then the basic model for product launches at every price point has been essentially the same, with all watches being released as limited editions and available only for a limited time.

The new 37.02 Minimalist, however, is not a limited edition, and moreover, it’s the first MING watch to come from the company’s new manufacturing and assembling center in Switzerland – Horloger MING S.A. This was set up to allow MING to shorten development and production times, and one result is that in addition to the non-limited status of the 37.02 Minimalist, it’s also available immediately.

The Minimalist is 38mm x 11mm, with domed sapphire crystals front and back and it’s water resistant to 100M. The movement is a modified Sellita for MING SW300M1, with skeletonized bridges and an anthracite finish, and a 45 hour power reserve. The Minimalist is very reminiscent, in its accessibility and design, to the original 17.01 series, but it also has a neat trick up its sleeve when the lights go out.

The dial is sapphire, and the linear markers for the hours are etched into the dial surface and then filled with lume. The luminous material on the hands is standard, high grade Super-LumiNova X1. In our recent story on lume we got into the granular details of the manufacturing process – SLN was originally invented by a Japanese firm called Nemoto and is manufactured in Switzerland by R.C. Tritec. Tritec can make SLN in almost any color, but the intensity of the lume varies, with the brightest glow coming from blue and blue-green colors and the weakest from colors at the yellow and red ends of the spectrum. What you cannot get as a standard order from any lume supplier, is luminous material that emits a white glow – SLN looks white under daylight, but the emitted light is always a specific color.

So how did MING produce a watch with white lume? White light looks white to the human eye because it is a mixture of different wavelengths – that is to say, different colors. To get a white glow, MING combines luminous materials that glow across the full range of the visible spectrum, and then applies further processes to ensure the mixture is as homogenous as possible. The luminous material is then mixed with a liquid base, and applied to the grooves etched into the sapphire dial.

MING calls the material Polar White, which for serious MING enthusiasts could be seen as a shout out to one of the earliest custom designed watches Ming Thein ever created – these were two annual calendars produced in 2015 with ochs und junior, which had a dial marker shaped like the stylized nose of a polar bear. That basic shape can still be seen in the 12:00 marker of the MING Minimalist 37.02.

The Minimalist isn’t the first watch from MING designed for daily wear, but it is the first to be a regular production piece and it has all the features you would expect from a watch designed to be worn on a daily basis, including a sturdy, water resistant case and a movement selected both for its customizability and for its ease of service, as well as a strap designed for comfort and durability. Price at launch is CHF 3250 and the 37.02 is available at Ming.watch.