Unusual Watch Dial Materials: From Bullets to Dinosaur Bones

I’ve been down a big rabbit hole on dials and dial types. The original stimulus for this post was getting a watch from Mr Jones - a British based watch company - which is this Ascendent which utilises gilded palladium to achieve a very cool looking effect.

Of course this is a much broader topic that goes into to different techniques like: guilloche dials, tappisserie patterns, sector dials, linen dials, pie pan dials, sunburst and the various other types of finish. But to keep things slightly manageable I’d thought I’d share with you all some of the different materials that have been used for watch dials, with some examples. It’s pretty mind boggling the variety of things that have been done.

Enamel

First - Enamel dials , porcelain enamel dials- or vitreous enamel dials. Enamel means any hard coating - for example like the enamel from your teeth - but for watch and clock dials its essentially powdered glass melted onto the underlying metal plate. You can then treat it in various ways - for example the great blog on this topic on vintage straps mentions the application of tin oxide which produces the classic white enamel dials - with you baking it in the oven and then applying enamel paint to mark the numbers and such. These dials are all relatively unique as they are never perfect due to being melted, smoothed and fired several times so there will be imperfections - which adds character. This was the go to approach for pocket watches and early watches before metal dials almost completely took over. It’s now more of an artistic choice for the conisseur .

Examples of awesome enamel dials are the Credor Eichi II which I think looks absolutely stunning if you look at this picture from Hodinkee.

The Gran Feu Enamel dial of the Akrivia Chronomètre Contemporain marked with Rexhep Rexhepi is also a great looking example.

I like this Vacheon Constantin celebration of the Mercator maps.

A more affordable recent option and a Scottish one at that is Anordain - which gives you an idea of the different colours you can achieve and they even do a fume - smoked effect - enamel dial.

For some very fancy enamelling - look at Jaquet Droz hummingbird watch these guys do all sorts of bonkers dials

Lacquer

In a different vein - lacquered dials such as Urushi Grand Seiko Dials are also stunning - which use sap from a Japanese tree that is matured and more commonly used for high end fountain pens.

And I particularly like this Glashutte original sixties inspired watch made in their dial factory which is made in a multi step process beyond just the lacquer.

Wood

Another material not used so much - is wood dials. Of course, as is a recurring theme here Rolex had some of these on day date models.

A particularly fancy version is burl wood - which is an outgrowth of wood that forms some nice circular patterns when sliced - with an example being this breitling limited edition for Bentley using elm burl.

Hermes with their wood marquetry model the Pegasse Paysage Amarante- with marquetry being a technique where material is cut into tiny pieces and then put back together to form a pattern - according to crown watch blog - this was a technique that goes back to ancient Egypt but was popularised during the 18th century.

Patek philippe also used this technique in the royal tiger from 2010.

If we want to go crazy - what about this Louis Moinet palm wood dial from a 70 million year old rainforest tree

Stone

Now stone dials could keep us here all day - even with just the Rolex brand - of which a fairly exhaustive list has been curated at millenary watches. Stone dials primarily started in the 60s with the likes of Piaget leading the way - especially with ladies watches. These include:

Lapis lazuli which JLC use to great effect in this dial

Astorite was discovered by John Astor who was the richest person aboard the titanic and a victim of its sinking. As a side note - Romain Jerome made watch dial made out of pieces of the titanic - “or titanic coal” - whatever that means. Anyway, astorite was used in a dial by Jaquet Droz who are famous for using such rare materials in their watches

Piaget dial using marquetry and malachite

Turquoise stone - rather than simply just turquoise coloured has also been used in dials with examples from Rolex

Bloodstone on yet another Rolex day date

Opal has been used on Piaget dials

Carnelian Stone on this Rado voyager

There is a Coral in this Rolex day date

And Marble or howlite in this one

And Sodalite on this Daytona

Tigers Eye has a cool name and indeed looks cool with this parmigiani example

Labradorite - the dog lovers gem stone perhaps - is used in this lundis bleus watch

…and even a concrete dial with this watch by Dzmitry Samal

You may be bored of these stone dials after that list - and there are many I haven’t included - but there are two more areas related to stone dials worth noting.

Meteorite

First, meteorite dials. Most use material from the Gibeon iron meteorite - which fell in Africa in modern day Namibia - during prehistoric times. I’ve seen people say that all meterorite dials used this - which seems to be incorrect or at least outdated as there are example of folks using the Muonionalusta meteorite from Sweden. Gibeon exhibits so called Widmanstätten patterns which are made of of long nickel iron crystals that appear when the meteorite slice is treated with chemicals. This is named after Count Alois von Beckh Widmanstätten of the Imperial Porcelain works based in Vienna in 1808 - who discovered this effect when experimenting with iron meterorites.

The first brand to have the idea to use this in a watch dial was of course Rolex.

Omega used it in the grey side of the moon version of the speedmaster.

The absolute coolest one Ive seen is this incredible De Bethune DB28XP Meteorite by Denis Flageollet covered in a great article by monochrome watches. They deployed some fancy techniques to blue the meteorite dial which looks super sci-fi.

I’ve noticed that its a pretty common view amongst watch reviewers to not be too fussed on meterorite dials - as they are seen as a gimmick - you saw this a lot with the 2021 Rolex meteorite dial for example.

They could have a point as even brands like Invicta have pulled together a meteorite dial offering - got to love that price cut from 800 to 228… But you can’t escape the coolness of having an extraterrestrial material on your wrist. I think they are great.

Exotic material

Quick aside whilst we are on gimmicky stuff - the Romain Jerome Moondust watch is probably the most ridiculous example of leveraging the exoticness of material to sell watches - these are the same people that built watches from metal from the titanic. This watch has certified moon dust on the dial and uses metal from the Soyuz spacecraft and Apollo 11 as well as fibres from the space suits of international space station astronauts - this truly is a rabbit hole.

Second - good old coprolite - more commonly known as fossilised dinosaur poo - which was used by the brand artya who’ve made a name for themselves by making dials out of funky stuff.

A classier fossil based dial is stromatolite - one of the oldest fossils known - which Daniel Haas - one of the leading guys in the exotic dial field - made for Louis Moinet.

He worked on similar projects such as a watch dial made out of Dinosaur bones!

Another fossil based watch is the Rolex day date was an ammonite dial

See what I mean about stone dials being a whole world in itself?

Precious materials and metals

In a related area we have more precious metals and materials. Established in the 30s, but used more widely in the 40s - electroplating enabled the use of precious metals on the dial, which could then be manipulated to form cool multi tone dials. Things such as aluminium have also been used as the basis for dials - including from the likes of Vacheron Constantin but we’re talking about fancier stuff than that.

Mother of pearl or nacre is the lining of the inside of the shell of oysters and other molluscs. It is this substance that eventually forms pearls hence why it is the mother of pearl. With this A Lange and Zohne and this Vacheron Constantin being nice examples from a good hodinkee article on this topic.

Yellow Gold as well as being the substance for the case and materials has also been the basis for dials - including this example from Omega

which has also been done for rose gold,

white gold - these FP journe solid gold dials are particularly fancy as they have gold plates that are then topped off with a silver layer to achieve the grain effect you see

and even red gold and rhodium with Anordain previously mentioned recently moving into this area with its precious metal series

Solid Silver can been seen on this A Lange and Sohne

and platinum have also been used in dials I believe although i;ve been struggling to distinguish between when this is referring to solid platinum and silver dials vs. Simply being coloured that way -

Aventurine is a very interesting material which is a type of glass - its name originates from “by chance” in Italian as this was how it was said to be discovered by some Italian glassblowers in the 17th century. One of the first using the material was potentially Omega according to a quill and pad article.

And this insane Hybris Artistica Master Gyrotourbillon from JLC has has a skeletonised dial made of aventurine.

Ceramic

A material we hear a lot about with bezels, and even whole watches with the like of Rado, is ceramic. However, it has also been used in the form of dials. Good examples include the Omega Dark side of the moon made from matt black zirconium oxide.

As well as The Bulgari Octo Finissimo achieving a similar look

Carbon Fiber

We get into some modern materials when we look at the use of carbon fiber. For example the Panerai Submersible Marina Militare Carbotech 47mm has a dial made from their carbotech material

One of the more fascinating forms of carbon is so called Vanta black technology - with Vanta standing for Vertically Aligned Nanotube Arrays - which prevent light rays from escaping and essentially absorb them as heat after they bounce around they array. It was developed by Surrey Nanosystems in 2014 and caused quite the controversy due to the artist Anish Kapoor securing the exclusive rights to its use in art and preventing others from doing so.

H Moser and Cie did a Vanta Black dial. Essentially it was the blackest possible black and almost looks like you have just formed a black hole on your wrist.

Honourable mentions

Some honourable mentions are:

Feather dials based on the art of plumasserie;

Coin dials;

denim dials;

dials made from bullets;

Espresso capsules.

And finally - hopefully you’ve found this post more interesting than watching paint dry - but if dried paint is your thing then fordite dials made from dried paint are for you.