What’s In Your Watch?

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Spoonful of sugar
4 minutes read
The answer might surprise you…

These past few years, the most interesting developments in watchmaking materials have been in the domain of sustainability, which is a worthy cause we can all certainly get behind. At Watches and Wonders 2023, Chopard announced their increased adoption of Lucent Steel (first introduced via their Alpine Eagle collection in 2019), a recycled steel alloy that offers an ethical as well as physical/aesthetic advantage, being both harder and brighter than standard stainless steel. Panerai reiterated their use of sustainable materials such as eSteel in three of their new Radiomir models, while TAG Heuer pressed ahead on the advantages of lab-grown diamonds with the Carrera Diamant Plasma d’Avant-Garde. We always knew that every watch comes with a heart, but now some of them also come with a conscience.

There’s nothing new about making a conceptual statement with the contents of a watch. Past editions of the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie (SIHH), the predecessor of Watches and Wonders, saw some of the most buzzworthy pieces of horological storytelling ever made by an undisputed leader of the genre — H. Moser & Cie. Their cheese-cased Swiss Mad Watch and vegetation-sprouting Nature Watch were initially dismissed as gimmicks, but started important discussions about watch labelling, component provenance, and ecological conservation. 

What’s In Your Watch?

We’ve racked our memories to think of some of the most unusual materials you might find in a watch. Some of these are true explorations of watchmaking or luxury ideology, others are examples of material experimentation in context of a brand partnership. None of them was made just for the sake of stirring controversy or as a PR stunt. As befitting an industry built on the logic and principles of mechanical engineering, everything here was made for a reason.

 

Sand

Top three places where sand is decidedly unwelcome: in your plate of seafood spaghetti, in the delicate parts of your anatomy, in a mechanical instrument. The early years of HYT, however, brought us a watch that literally had grains of sand embedded in its case. The limited-edition H1 Sand Barth (2014) utilised a case made of high-grade epoxy resin encapsulating sand from the legendary beach of Anse du Gouverneur on the island of Saint-Barthélemy. A few years ago, a wave of anti-consumerist thought promoted the idea that we should spend our money on experiences rather than on things. This is a blatantly false dichotomy, as the HYT H1 Sand Barth demonstrates. You can have a combination of experience and thing. Your beach paradise vacation can forever be memorialised by becoming part of your watch.  

What’s In Your Watch?

Straw

Watch dials are a canvas for artistic expression, and while traditional decorative techniques like enamelling and gem-setting maintain an evergreen popularity, experimental materials do pop up from time to time. We’ve seen feathers and butterfly wings used in marquetry-style dials, which is fairly logical since feathers and butterfly wings are nature’s way of decorating its own creations. But straw? The agricultural byproduct used to bed cattle and mulch gardens? The Hermès Arceau Marqueterie de Paille (2012) was distinguished by dials of straw marquetry, reportedly a much trickier technique to master than classical wood marquetry, since the softness of straw makes it difficult to cut the crisp, sharp edges required for this precise craft.

What’s In Your Watch?

Sugar

Generally speaking, you don’t want food in your watch, unless you’re one of those horological tinkerers who soaks watches in apple cider vinegar and marinara sauce to artificially hasten the development of case patina. Bovet, however, decided to flip the script on this particular piece of accepted wisdom, and gave us the Miss Audrey Sweet Art (2021), containing a dial blanketed in sugar crystals, specially coated to preserve them in perpetuity without melting or otherwise degrading. If you ever wanted that extra dose of sweetness in your life without actually adding more sugar to your diet, skip the supermarket dessert aisle and head to your nearest Bovet boutique.

What’s In Your Watch?

Grass

Football fans don’t get much credit nowadays, often being painted as beer-swilling hooligans with a penchant for instigating public disturbances. However, their stalwart support of their chosen clubs and the profound loyalty they exhibit are fine character qualities that any luxury brand would love to see in their own audiences. The first major crossover between Swiss watchmaking and professional football came with Hublot and their partnership with English Premier League mega-club Manchester United. The Hublot King Power “Red Devil” Manchester United limited edition (2012) contained resin-preserved grass from Old Trafford, the home of Manchester United. 

What’s In Your Watch?

Bug secretions

This might surprise you, but there are insect secretions in almost every single mechanical watch ever made. It’s not an accidental inclusion, like the occasional bug that gets smashed up in the process of making canned tomatoes. This is something that is deliberately incorporated in a key component of watch movements. I’m talking about shellac, the exudate of lac bugs that is painstakingly harvested, refined and used to affix synthetic ruby pallets to a watch escapement anchor. Probably the only mechanical watch movements that don’t contain shellac are those with silicon escapements, so if you own a mechanical timepiece, chances are that a very tiny percentage of it is of insect origin. 

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