A timepiece that is as beautiful as it is practical, the Ressence Type 5 is a genuinely revolutionary watch.

In the pantheon of contemporary watch brands, there are many that offer hand-crafted excellence as standard. Others can trace their history back decades, or boast an association with great feats of bravery, sporting prowess or geographical discovery. None, however, is quite like Ressence, the impeccably fashioned Antwerp-based, Swiss-made watch brand launched by industrial designer Mr Benoît Mintiens in 2010. This is a very good thing – and something that’s especially clear to see in the new Type 5 diving watch, a first in its field, which lands on MR PORTER today.

Ressence’s watches are instantly recognisable for their unique aesthetic: instead of a pair of rotating hands, each piece in the range feature’s the brand’s Rocs face – a trio of discs representing different dimensions of time, which rotate pleasingly around each other (almost like orbiting planets) in an ultra-flat watch face.

Though the overall effect looks like a particularly crisp piece of digital design, the mechanism is 100 per cent mechanical – something that is particularly incredible in the Type 5, in which the numerals and digits appear to be floating on the surface of the bubble-shaped watch case. In fact, this is because the top half of the case, which contains the Rocs face, is filled with 35ml of oil – Ressence calls it the “water drop” effect. The variable volume of this oil (which fluctuates with temperature) is controlled by seven mini bellows inside the watch, and you can see how hard they’re working by looking at the handy temperature gauge on its face.

The Type 5 is a watch so pleasant to look at that it’s easy to forget it’s also designed with a specific purpose in mind. Yes, it’s perfectly stylish enough to wearing on dry land, but if you do decide to take the plunge, you’ll be reassured that it meets the ISO 6425 standards (making it suitable for water immersion up to 100 metres) that are a requisite for every diving watch. What’s more, its oil-filled case makes the face legible from any angle, even when underwater. This makes it a first in its category, a fact that Mr Mintiens notes with a certain amount of incredulity. “Isn’t it time for a diving watch to be legible underwater?” he asks in the press notes. The answer of course is “Yes, absolutely.” And, PS, “Hurrah!”