How much do you know about the Mojave Desert? In terms of name recognition, it’s punching above its weight. This is largely thanks to the fact that it contains Death Valley, home of the hottest recorded air temperature on Earth (a withering 57ºC) and the lowest point in North America (86m below sea level, in case you wondered). It’s also home to a little-known town of restrained taste and puritan values called Las Vegas.

It’s not the desert’s points of interest that concern us today, however. In fact, quite the opposite – it’s the terrain’s featureless uniformity that we have to thank for the watches you see here. Wide open spaces with very little besides barren rock and sand make good homes for the awkward business of testing large explosives, which is how the Mojave Desert also came to be the site of the US Navy’s largest land base: Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake.

Since the 1940s, it has operated as the Navy’s primary testing facility for rockets, missiles and much else besides. And in 2019, thanks to its long-standing relationship with the US Navy’s Top Gun instructor programme, IWC SCHAFFHAUSEN started creating pilot’s watches with a sandy, desert-camo look to them in specific homage to the personnel of China Lake. These models are known as the “Mojave Desert” editions and are only ever produced in limited numbers.

The reason for that – and the reason they have only been around for a few years – is that transforming the ceramic-cased Top Gun watch into a new colour is no simple matter. Ceramic watches aren’t painted or coated: you alter their appearance by changing their chemical make-up, introducing tiny amounts of different metal oxides to the basic zirconium oxide powder that is then fired together to make the rock-hard, scratch-proof watch case worthy of a military-grade timepiece.

Every chemical change has the potential to destabilise the mix, potentially making it weaker, so the process of developing new colours is a time-consuming one. And this is the end result: the IWC Big Pilot’s Watch and Big Pilot’s Perpetual Calendar, in sandy shades of beige, complete with a matching textile strap.

It’s a remarkable exercise; the underlying design harks back to the brand’s very first pilot’s watches, and as such is still designed for maximum legibility, but when you outfit it in this, subtle, shaded colour palette, it transforms the watch. Of course, it’s a nod to military camouflage, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t see it as a bit of a style statement, too. Dressing tone-on-tone takes courage and a steady hand to get right.

Powered by IWC’s in-house movements (including the renowned perpetual calendar originally designed by Mr Kurt Klaus, and still one of the only such movements to be completely adjusted via the crown), they’re as no-nonsense within as they are without. Form and function in equal measure, you might say.