At some point a technology matures and, yes, on late-nite TV you'll see ads touting new ways to core an apple or take the scratches out of your car's paint, but technologically your garden variety one-piece triathlon wetsuit is just about as far along as you can take it.

Enterprising manufacturers will always be on the lookout for a new wrinkle, though, and Aquaman was the first to bring to market a wetsuit that is smoothskin inside and out. Check that. It was the first tri wetsuit company to do it. Surf wetsuit makers have had this rubber for awhile.

Why would a surf company be interested in this feature? Skankiness, primarily. Besides the fact that many surfers (not all) might own wetsuits on which various forms of life are spawned and nurtured surfers, in all fairness, have the opposite goal as do triathletes. They try to spend as much time in their wetsuits as possible—we triathletes the least amount of time. When you spend several hours a days sitting around in a suit of rubber, skank happens.

Skank tends to coagulate and coalesce and generally take up residence in what we call the "jersey," that is, the fabric part of the suit. I would guess that if one of these Mars missions was to take a used surf wetsuit up there and leave it for 2 or 3 months, there would certainly finally be life on that planet. Hence the idea of removing the fabric (from the inside of the suit especially).

Why would this be of interest to a triathlete? Jersey retains water, and theoretically the more water the jersey holds, the more weight you're carrying around with you. This sounds good in theory, but does it work in practice, that is, while this theory certainly must "hold water" on the outside of the suit, what about jersey on the inside? This is part of the rationale behind the Metal Cell: less water retention means less weight you're dragging around.

How is this rubber made? In a triathlon wetsuit the point of the jersery is to add tensile strength to the rubber, much like wire mesh in a concrete slab or the chicken wire in a lath and plaster wall. It also allows a stitch to be added to a seam, to aid the glue in keeping the seams together (in a glued & blindstitched wetsuit). The rubber in the Metal Cell uses a smoothskin one side, "split" one side, .5mm rubber sheet laminated to a 4.5mm sheet that is smooth one side, jersey one side. The jersey side is mated to the split, giving you a rubber sheet that is smoothskin on both sides with a layer of fabric buried just under the surface of the inside of the rubber. When you see a Bionik's stitch on the inside of the suit, yes, the needle is passing through bare rubber, but the hook-shaped blindstitch needle is picking up the fabric buried just underneath.

You can do this sort of thing with thicker rubber (perhaps as thin as 3mm) but in the 2mm rubber used in the arms of a tri wetsuit, forget it. That's why the Bionik's rubber is of the sort described above except in the arms, which uses standard Yamamoto smoothskin rubber that has a jersey on the inside of the suit.

I suppose there is a way to test the theory of this rubber's utility for triathlon-style wetsuits, but test it I didn't. Probably I'd need somebody to lift me out of the water with a crane, like a manatee, and weigh me—suit, water and all. Then do so with a standard suit.

I suspect a better way to keep water out of the suit is just by making a good suit. The best suits I ever owned were almost water proof, with very little water ever entering the suit even though the idea behind a wetsuit is to have a layer of water in between you and it.

It was impossible for me to tell whether the Bionik has any capacity to help me tote around less water while swimming than would, say, Ultraman's Pulsar. Just the same, it was a very comfortable suit, and very warm. It was also an easy suit to enter either dry or wet, and very easy to get off. Entry and exit may be the most valuable trait of the rubber the Bionik uses.

The Metal Cell is also an easier suit to clean, and to keep clean. No, triathletes don't need this function to the degree a surfer does, but it's still a feature worth having.

This isn't the first Aquaman suit I've reviewed, and not the first time I'll mention the zipper. But I'll write about it again, because I don't get the sense that people understand the efficacy in its design. There is a plus and a minus to a zipper that works "backward." Aquaman's zipper functions like the zipper on your jacket, except upside down. You must "mate" the slider to the track at the top of your neck and then close the zipper by zipping down. This makes the zipper more difficult to zip closed prior to the swim start than a regular zipper. But, when you exit the water—when time is at a premium—the zipper cord is easier to find, and zipper's slider unzips more freely in this direction. This sort of zipper is also a bit less bulky in the back of the neck, because the slider is down in your low back when the suit is on.

You have to decide what matters to you. Certain people will have enough difficulty that they'll need help in zipping their wetsuit prior to the race. But Sheila Taormina (right), Greg Bennett and Laura Reback (together above left), Olivier Marceau and Becky Gibbs-Lavelle (top right), all top ITU athletes where the importance of transitions are magnified, happily trade that for a suit that is faster to exit.

One can argue the merits of different fullsuit configurations, whether one-piece or two-piece, for example, is the superior design. If one-piece floats your boat, the Metal Cell might be the acme of that class. Just like any product at the top of its class, you'll pay for this technology. The Metal Cell sells for $480. But you'll be very happy with this wetsuit for years to come.

You'll find the Metal Cell explained in more detail on Aquaman's English language website, as well as information on how to obtain it.