De Bethune DB25xs Sand Winds Turns Titanium Into a Desert Landscape

De Bethune has always treated titanium as more than a lightweight case material.

With the DB25xs Sand Winds, the independent watchmaker pushes that idea into one of its most atmospheric dials yet, using heat, handwork and an intentionally irregular guilloché pattern to evoke wind moving across dunes.

It’s a quieter counterpoint to the brand’s more futuristic DB28 watches, but it still carries the unmistakable De Bethune vocabulary.

At a glance

A titanium dial shaped by heat and handwork

The Sand Winds dial is the reason this watch exists.

De Bethune uses yellow heat-treated titanium, then gives the surface its distinctive movement through a random guilloché pattern that avoids the strict symmetry of traditional engine-turning.

Instead of a repeated architectural motif, the dial is crossed by uneven horizontal waves that catch light like dune ridges.

That looseness is important because it keeps the watch from feeling like a conventional métiers d’art exercise.

The effect is animated further by hand-applied spherical white gold stars, a detail that connects the watch to the celestial language long associated with De Bethune’s Starry Varius pieces.

A rounded titanium chapter ring carries Arabic numerals and polished spherical hour markers, while the open-tipped Breguet-style hands bring a more classical note to the composition.

Both the hands and markers are heat-treated to a warm brown tone, giving the dial a softer contrast than blued steel would have allowed.

The smaller DB25xs case keeps the watch elegant

The DB25 collection has always been the more classical side of De Bethune, using round drum-shaped cases and hollowed, tapering lugs rather than the floating architecture of the DB28.

Here, the DB25xs format gives the watch a 40.6mm polished grade 5 titanium case with a slim 8.8mm profile.

Those proportions matter because they keep the visual drama of the dial from turning into wrist presence for its own sake.

The openworked lugs, finished with the family’s bullet-shaped tips, add just enough tension to the case without disturbing its dress-watch balance.

With titanium construction and a brown alligator leather strap, the Sand Winds should wear lighter than its visual richness suggests.

Inside the six-day DB2005 calibre

The exhibition caseback reveals De Bethune’s in-house calibre DB2005, a hand-wound movement that runs at 4Hz and delivers a six-day power reserve.

That autonomy comes from the brand’s patented self-regulating twin-barrel system.

The movement also brings several De Bethune signatures, including a heat-blued titanium balance wheel with white gold inserts, a balance spring with a flat terminal curve, a silicon escape wheel and the brand’s triple pare-chute shock-absorbing system.

The finishing is unmistakably contemporary De Bethune.

A large delta-shaped barrel bridge dominates the view, decorated with Côtes de Bethune stripes and paired with a thermally blued central brace.

The visible architecture also includes solarised barrel edges and a mirror-polished balance bridge, giving the back of the watch the same technical sharpness as the dial’s more poetic front.

Details & Specifications

The DB25xs Sand Winds is the kind of De Bethune that rewards close looking rather than instant spectacle.

Its appeal sits in the tension between classical proportions and experimental material craft, making it a natural fit for collectors who want the brand’s imagination in a more restrained case.