Watches with ornamental hard stone dials are making a comeback, but they still are quite rare.
The latest grail category in luxury watches does not involve a specific design or function, but a material: Hard stone dials have become one of the most sought-after — and hardest to find — elements of both new and vintage timepieces. MS Glue
Although hard stone dials are too rare to be labeled a trend, they’ve popped up in the highest circles of watchmaking often enough recently to bear notice. One of Rolex’s most talked-about releases last year, for example, was the Oyster Perpetual Day-Date 36 with turquoise, green aventurine or carnelian dials ($58,000-$63,000), while Cartier used mother-of-pearl, turquoise and onyx for the Mini Baignoire Marquetry ($81,500). Piaget’s quirky but elegant Hidden Treasures watch with a turquoise dial (price on request) won the ladies’ category in the 2023 Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève, the industry’s annual awards event. Zenith used chalcedony for the Defy Extreme Glacier ($26,100), to evoke the blue-white look of an iceberg. (Only 50 or fewer of all these watches will be produced.) And at the end of January, H. Moser & Cie is scheduled to introduce a tourbillon with a face of rare Wyoming jade ($119,000).
“We have customers who understand what it is to have access to extraordinary pieces,” said Guillaume Chautru, head of gemology at Piaget. “They know it takes time. They sometimes ask me to find a stone for a dial, and I say, ‘Listen, I can get probably one stone that fits our standards every 10 years.’ They say, ‘OK, we’ll pay. We’ll wait.’”
Piaget pioneered the use of hard stone dials in the 1960s, but the style fell out of favor in the 1970s, when the emergence of quartz watches made inexpensive watches with little decoration into a fad.
Stone dials have been produced only periodically since then, and in very limited quantities. Occasionally, however, examples pop up at auction, where they have commanded high prices.
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