https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/the-black-bay-ceramic-is-tudors-new-dark-star

The Black Bay Ceramic, first of all, is visibly and immediately a Black Bay. Sure, it's in ceramic now, but there's still the familiar slab-sided case, with its tank-like proportions (and I mean the armored fighting vehicle, not the Cartier wristwatch). It's a lighter watch, thanks to the case material, but it's still at its heart the burly, retro-adjacent sports watch we've all come to know and love.

Or is it? While the original Black Bay (and BB 58) made no bones about reaching for the retro, the Black Bay Ceramic is in some ways a totally new Black Bay. No slightly Ye Olde Vintage Watch cues here. Instead, we have a slickly rendered exercise in glossy and matte black textures, without a speck of color anywhere. The gilt is gone, with the dial legend now in muted grayscale lettering, and the ceramic bezel is uncompromising in its devotion to the Dark Side – there isn't even a bezel lume pip.

If you're used to what the Black Bay was before the Ceramic debuted, it's actually shocking. It's also eerily beautiful. The luminous markers and hands seem to float, glowing by their own light, like the landing lights on the deck of an aircraft carrier at night.

It's a thought-provoking watch, and indeed comes across as a bit of an intentional provocation (which is not a new thing for either Rolex or Tudor – think of that platinum anniversary Daytona from 2013, or more recently, Tudor's 2019 P01 – both watches that had a non-zero percentage of enthusiasts gnashing their teeth). The whole thing is, yes, a Black Bay, but in its slick, icy modernity, it also seems a rejection of everything we thought the Black Bay stood for. The fact that there's no lume pip means you're pushing it even calling this a "dive watch."

It's also, not gonna lie, gasp-inducingly handsome. Both back and front – that METAS-certified MT5602-IU is almost as nicely turned out on the back, as the watch is topside – it's got all the sable seductiveness of an SR-71 Blackbird. Unlike the spy plane, though, the color scheme of the BB Ceramic isn't driven by practical considerations – it is, instead, design for the sake of design.