Five photos circle one strange skin: a pale, crazed crust with blue-grey tints lying over a dark body like lichen colonizing a rock — cracked into plates, lifting at edges, thinning to bare dark in patches. Nothing else in the 1848–1899 run looks like it (the registry holds it as a one-piece watch case; a second lichen-crusted piece would earn the term). It is handbuilt beneath all that weather, and the crust’s chemistry stays its own.
Is the crust stable? The photos show plates of pale crust with lifted edges, cracked and thinning to bare dark in patches. Piece 1872 of 10,000, listed at $18.72.
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