Introducing the Parmigiani Fleurier × Revolution & The Rake Tonda PF Micro-Rotor “Serenissima”

People following my quixotic, often bumbling video exploits in the realm of high watchmaking have noticed that I often use the colloquialism “dope,” as in “dude, this watch is dope,” when assigning praise to my favorite timepieces. Which inspired me to study the etymology of this term. The results are, shall we say, misleading as previous usages of the term skewed towards negativity, i.e. “That guy’s a dope.” So I was perplexed how in the context of ’80s rapper parlance “dope” came to express all things that are good and beneficent to humanity, until I realized that the first three letters are the same as those of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is responsible for flooding our nervous systems with the sensation of pleasure — a feeling that cuts to the very nexus of the term “dope.”

I remember the exact moment I set eyes on the act of unremitting dopeness that is Guido Terreni’s Tonda PF last year during Geneva Watch Days held at the tail end of summer. Within seconds, I experienced something unusual, confusing and definitely unexpected. Though the weather was balmy, with a bright blue Geneva sky painted idyllically over the famous lake visible from the Parmigiani Fleurier suite in the Hotel Beau Rivage, it was not responsible for the meteoric rise in temperature I was experiencing. That was down to my brain’s sudden and explosive production of dopamine, leading to a sudden increase in heart rate.