Enamelling is a tedious process, to put it mildly. The raw material must first be ground into a fine powder, and then mixed with a suitable medium (oils or water are both used) to form a paint-like emulsion. This liquid is then applied like paint, before being fired in a kiln to vitrify it – the medium evaporates, while the powder melts and fuses into glass. There are variations to these steps, of course. Some manufactures, for example, choose to sieve the power directly onto a base of either brass or gold, and fire this “layer” of powder directly. Whatever the process, every step is fraught with danger. The product may crack during the firing process. Unseen impurities may surface as imperfections. Colours may react in unexpected ways. There are numerous risks to endure. Why, then, does this technique continue to be used?

Despite all its drawbacks, enamel still has a depth and nuance that cannot be replicated anywhere else. It is also permanent – vitrified enamel is essentially inert and, like noble metals, will remain unchanged a century from now. The different techniques used in enamelling are capable of creating a wide spectrum of products as well, from a single large surface free of blemishes, to microscopic levels of detail in an enamel painting. Perhaps the romantic aspect of this metiers d’art accounts for part of its appeal too; the time and touch of the enamellist is the perfect counterpoint to the watchmaker, with art on one side and science on the other.

Variations on Theme

Enamels are fired at various temperatures – or not at all – depending on their types. Grand feu (literally “great fire”) enamel is fired at around 820 degrees Celsius, although intermediate firings to “set” it may be at around 100 degrees Celsius, to boil the solvent off without fusing the powder. Enamels in general, including those used in miniature painting, may also be fired at around 100 degrees Celsius instead. Finally, there is cold enamel, an epoxy resin that cures and hardens at room temperature.

What difference does it make? For a start, higher temperatures are definitely more difficult to work with, since the enamel may crack during firing, or the subsequent cooling down process. The spectrum of colours used in grand feu enamelling is also more limited, as there are less compounds that can withstand the temperature. The choice of technique boils down to the desired product – for all its drawbacks, grand feu enamel has an inimitable look. A great monochromatic example is the Breguet reference 5177. Enamels, porcelains, and lacquers all share common properties of hardness, durability, and the ability to take on both matte and polished finishes. The three aren’t interchangeable though. Lacquer is an organic finish that is applied in layers, with each successive coat curing at room temperature before the next is added. Porcelain is a ceramic that is produced by firing materials in a kiln to vitrify them. Although enamel is also fired, it only contains glass and colouring compounds, and lacks porcelain’s clay content.

Raised Feilds

In champlevé enamelling, a thick dial base is engraved to create hollow cells, before these cavities are filled with enamel and fired. Because the engraving step produces rough surfaces at the bottom of each cell, the champlevé technique typically uses only opaque enamels. The method allows areas on the dial to be selectively excavated, and for enamels to be mixed freely within each dial. This is done to great effect in the Van Cleef & Arpel Brise d'Été (above and opposite), which demonstrates the brand's decorative chops with not only champlevé enamelling but also valloné and plique-à-jour (discussed later); valloné is a type of champlevé, with more depth and nuance thanks to hill-like reliefs.

Champlevé enamelling’s use isn’t limited to creating decorative art. In Parmigiani Fleurier’s Tecnica Ombre Blanche, for instance, it was simply the most appropriate technique. Although the timepiece has a simple white enamel dial, its surface is interrupted by three sub-dials and an aperture for the tourbillon. This watch was new in 2016 and not only has Parmigiani Fleurier not revisited it, what with the brand's renaissance, but no other brand has explored it either. As noted in our earlier story, the alternative here
would be to make a complete enamel dial, before cutting out the appropriate sections in the middle. One can, however, imagine the risks of doing that.

Is there a limit to the level of details that can be achieved with champlevé enamel? Patek Philippe may have the answer with the Ref. 6002 Sun Moon Tourbillon (right). Apart from the centre portion, which is produced using the cloisonné technique (discussed later), the timepiece’s dial is a work of champlevé enamel – even the railway track chapter ring was milled out in relief, before the recesses are filled with enamel and fired.

Engraving isn’t necessarily the only way to produce the cells used in champlevé enamel though. Hublot put a modern twist on things with the Classic Fusion Enamel Britto, by stamping the white gold dial base to create the raised borders between the cells. This not only reduces the time needed for each dial but also ensures uniformity between them. Subsequent steps, however, remain unchanged: the cells were sequentially filled with different colours of enamel and fired multiple times before the entire dial surface was polished to form a uniformly smooth surface.

Wire Work

Cloisonné enamelling is almost like the opposite of the champlevé technique – instead of removing material from a dial blank, things are added on it instead. The cloisons (literally “partitions”) here refer to the wires, each no thicker than a human hair, that the enamellist bends into shape and attaches onto a base to create enclosed cells. These cells are then filled with enamel of different colours, before the dial is fired to fuse the powder. The wires remain visible in the final product, and look like outlines of a drawing, with a metallic sheen that contrasts with the glassy surfaces of the infilled enamel.

Plique-à-jour (“letting in daylight) enamel can be considered a variation of cloisonné enamel, but the technique is a lot rarer owing to its complexity and fragility. Like its cloisonné sibling, plique-à-jour enamelling involves creating enclosed cells using wires, before filling them with enamel. In this case, however, there is no base. The lack of a backing can be achieved in various ways, but usually involves working on a base layer a la cloisonné enamelling, before filing it away to leave just the wires holding onto vitrified enamel. Since there is no base, plique-à-jour enamelling almost always involves transparent or translucent enamel that allows light through, which essentially creates tiny stained glass windows.

Van Cleef & Arpels has used the above technique to great effect. In the Lady Arpels Nuit Enchantee watch (seen here across both pages), a grisaille enamelled lower section supplies nightime context to an upper section with elements executed in plique-à-jour (the fairy's wings) and façonné enamel (to cradle the yellow sapphires) forms the foreground. Even the surfeit of sapphires, diamonds and rock crystal cannot overwhelm the artistry here.

Hybrid Theory

There are several “hybrid” techniques that combine enamelling with other decorative arts, and flinqué enamelling is arguably the best known given its long history of use. The technique combines guillochage with enamelling – a brass or gold dial is first decorated with guilloché, before layers of enamel are successively applied and fired. When this enamel coating is sufficiently thick, it is polished to create a smooth surface; the final result is a translucent lens through which the guilloché is admired. Depending on the desired effect, the enamel used may be colourless to impart a subtle sheen, or coloured for more visual oomph, like the trio of limited edition Rotonde de Cartier high complications unveiled at Watches & Wonders 2015. Vacheron Constantin has even adapted the technique by using guilloché patterns to mimic woven fabrics in the Métiers d’Art Elégance Sartoriale.

Developed by the husband-and-wife team of Olivier and Dominique Vaucher, shaded enamel (email ombrant) also involves the application of translucent enamel over an engraved dial. Instead of a regular pattern a la guilloché, however, shaded enamel entails the creation of an image in relief. This technique was last used in the Hermès Arceau Tigre, but the watchmaker does utilise other hybrid techniques, seen prominently on the unique Arceau pocket cheval punk.

The final technique here is Cartier’s enamel granulation, which combines enamelling with Etruscan granulation originally used by goldsmiths. The craft requires multiple steps and is extremely tedious, to say the least. Enamel is first worked into threads of different diameters, before these threads are chipped off bit by bit to form beads of various sizes. The beads are then sorted by colour and applied to the dial successively to assemble an image, with intermediate firings to set and fuse the enamel. As different colours of enamel fuse at different temperatures, there is a clearly-defined order for the assembly process; up to 30 firings are necessary, and each dial requires nearly a month to complete. Like shaded enamel, enamel granulation is a very recent development, and Cartier is reviving it in its Maison des Métiers d’Art in La Chaux-de-Fonds.

Metallic Content

Paillonné is among the rarest enamelling techniques today, and practically synonymous with Jaquet Droz, which mainly works on special creations these days. The manufacture did have full-time enamellists who don’t just produce enamel dials, but also train artisans to perpetuate this know-how. The “paillon” here refers to the small ornamental motifs that are created from gold leaf, and are the calling card of the technique. Essentially, paillonné enamelling involves setting paillons within enamel to form patterns, with regular geometric ones being the norm. Emblematic of this technique is the Patek Philippe
Ref. 5077/100G models, as seen here. The technique begins with a layer of coloured enamel that is first fired to set it. Upon this layer, the paillons are positioned, before translucent enamel is applied and fired, thus “locking” the paillons in. Additional steps can be taken to create even more intricate designs. Before the coloured enamel layer is applied, for instance, the substrate surface may first be decorated with guilloché, which basically creates flinqué enamel that is then decorated with paillons over it. Alternatively, the substrate surface can be hand engraved – there are no hard and fast rules to this.

In lieu of regular patterns, Jaeger-LeCoultre opted for a twist on the technique, by distributing flecks of silver randomly on the dial instead. The result can be seen in the Hybris Artistica Duomètre Sphérotourbillon Enamel, whose enamel dial mimics the look of lapis lazuli. While not paillonné enamelling per se, Vacheron Constantin’s use of hand-applied precious powder deserves a mention here. In the manufacture’s Métiers d’Art Villes Lumières timepieces, gold, platinum, diamond, and pearl powders are affixed to the surface of the enamel dial by Japanese enamel artisan Yoko Imai. Instead of being covered with a layer of enamel, these particles sit atop them, and catch the light variously to mimic a bird’s eye view of a city at night.

Brush Strokes

Enamel painting is simply painting with enamel pigments rather than some other medium. The technique is challenging not just due to the canvas’s size, which makes it miniature painting as well, but also because of the multiple firings needed to vitrify and set the enamels, colour by colour by colour. Given the level of detail that can be achieved (as seen in the Patek Philippe Ref. 5531R here), however, this is
one of the few techniques that are capable of making their subjects almost lifelike. Consider Slim d’Hermès Pocket Panthère, which has the eponymous animal rendered in this technique, for example. Jaeger-LeCoultre has many examples, courtesy of its in-house workshops.

Grisaille enamel can be considered a subset of enamel painting, and is a specific method of painting white on black to create monochromic imagery. The black canvas is grand feu enamel that must first be applied, fired, and then polished to create a perfectly smooth surface that’s free of imperfections. This preparatory step is, in and of itself, already very challenging, as minute flaws are extremely easy to spot on such a surface – this explains why most watch brands offer white enamel dials, but black onyx or lacquer dials instead of enamel. Upon this black canvas, the enamellist paints using Blanc de Limoges, which is a white enamel whose powder is more finely ground than normal. To create micro details, fine brushes, needles, and even cactus thorns are used, and the dial is painted and fired multiple times to create the nuanced paintings grisaille enamel is known for.

Owing to its complexity, grisaille enamel is rarely seen. There are brands that still offer metiers ‘dart watches with them though, sometimes even with their own take on the technique. In the Métiers d’Art Hommage à l’Art de la Danse collection, Vacheron Constantin opted to use translucent brown enamel for the dial base, to impart a greater sense of depth, while softening the contrast between the two colours. Patek Philippe and Van Cleef utilise the technique in models featured earlier in this story.

This article first appeared on WOW’s Legacy 2025 Issue

For more on the latest in luxury watch reads from WOW, click here.

Everose Gold

These are all complicated points and we will be covering them briefly. We bring this point to the fore because fine watchmaking has been in the public eye itself recently for the investment angle. Specifically, some types of watches might qualify as alternative investment assets. To be clear, we have always argued (or at least cautioned) against this but we acknowledge reality and there are many of you, dear readers, who are intrigued by the potential of watches to not only retain value but also to grow it.

Some years ago, before we dared to comment on the phenomenon of investing in watches, we hinted at what a dark world this might herald. It was an Editor’s Note with the catchy title Watches as Currency, and watches cased in precious metal are the personification of this idea. If gold, in particular, is a kind of currency, then wearing watches cased in this material will really be like having cash strapped to one’s wrist. Well, perhaps just a digital display that indicates how much the watch in question is valued at. A good way to grab the attention of thieves you say? Welcome to the world of those who rock all-gold watches, and Singapore might just be the safest place on earth to do this.

As a counterpoint, the watch-buying community knows all too well that the best deals available on the secondary market are timepieces cased in precious metals. That means any precious metal, not just gold. To be blunt, these are the types of watches that shed the most value, including examples from the biggest names in Swiss watchmaking. Generally speaking, the why of this is hard to explain, especially versus amped-up valuations on steel watches, but the hypothesis (from specialists, including us) is that the precious metal recommended retail prices have always been too high. This is especially true when any given brand also offers a model in a non-precious metal variant too.

Magic Gold

Hublot flexed its materials science muscle in 2012 with its demonstration of the properties of Magic Gold. While the manufacture was known for its forward- thinking ways prior to this, its fame was tied closely to synthetic materials. Hublot also has a proprietary gold alloy called King Gold, which owes its superior reddish hue to a higher-than-normal mix of copper, but this achievement was dwarfed by the arrival of Magic Gold, a type of metal matrix composite (MMC), which we covered briefly in Summer. Hublot is certainly not the only watch brand experimenting with MMCs but we focus here because Magic Gold is probably the most familiar material for watch cases, and remains a part of the core collection – Cerachrom and Ceragold are a different matter.

When it debuted, Magic Gold promised a golden revolution of sorts because it was meant to be a scratch-resistant gold alloy. It does not take expert knowledge to realise that gold is a relatively soft and dense metal that is prone to scratching – steel is significantly harder but no less of a scratch magnet, as they say in watch collecting circles. Hublot’s mission was to create and deliver a material that would qualify as 18k gold (as most gold watch cases are) that also exhibited a degree of scratch resistance that was all but impossible for a metal alloy. The manufacture decided to add ceramic (either as continuous strands or particulates) to a gold matrix to achieve this end. Nothing like this had been tried before in watchmaking so Hublot turned to the materials science experts at the EPFL in Lausanne. The manufacture has its own research and development facility, but fundamental research is impossible to do in a silo.

The materials specialists began with selecting their raw materials. This included 24k gold, aluminium, and boron carbide – boron carbide is a ceramic and is the third hardest substance known to humans. The proportions used were as follows: 75 percent (gold), 3 percent (aluminium) and 22 percent (boron carbide). Boron carbide powder is first compacted into a desired shape before being sintered to form a porous solid. Pure molten 24k gold is then forced into these pores under 200 bars of pressure – Hublot once described this as forcing water into a room full of footballs (EuropaStar, 2011). This revealing metaphor indicates that rather than the ceramic being the matrix that holds gold, it is the other way around. This is perfectly in line with Magic Gold being an MMC of course. Needless to say, Magic Gold is harder and more resistant to scratches than traditional gold alloys, while still maintaining the luxurious appearance and properties of gold. How tough is it, exactly? Well, apparently only diamond tools can make a dent in Magic Gold.

To machine Magic Gold, CNC machines equipped with ultrasonic cutters and diamond-tipped tools had to be specially ordered from Germany. Our last update on Magic Gold noted that 28 bezels in Magic Gold took three weeks to machine, and that only between 30-40 complete cases could be produced monthly. This is unlikely to have changed as Magic Gold remains truly rare in the Hublot assortment. It is no small thing that this innovation remains in play, and it has had more than 10 years now of testing Magic Gold in the wild. No solution is perfect, and Magic Gold may yet receive an update in the years to come.

Sedna Gold

Qualified honesty has everything to do with why watch brands with big industrial bases tend to flex materials science credentials with creations that advertise their expertise boldly. While Sedna gold was once associated exclusively with Omega, which introduced it in 2013, it is now a staple part of Blancpain offerings too. Needless to say, both brands are a part of the Swatch Group universe and the presence of Sedna gold at both brands is only one marker of the synergies at play. With this fact in mind, we will acknowledge the material developments with precious metals at Omega but would be remiss in our duties as a specialist commentator if we did not note the great work done at Rado, Tissot and Swatch itself in the area of ceramics, composites and polymers (various plastics).

All of the above is just proof positive that Swatch Group knows how to do fundamental research into new materials and how to industrialise the same. While in 2016 we wrote that Omega was making waves with its anti-magnetic movements, today we could report that many Swatch Group brands have followed suit. LiquidMetal, a zirconium-based amorphous alloy that gets inlaid into ceramic bezels using a combination of high heat and high pressure, was also deployed by Omega first, but has since been adopted by Blancpain. When it comes to case materials proper, Omega was also first out of the gate with Ceragold in 2012, which was a combination of ceramic and gold, although not quite rising to the level of Magic Gold.

While Ceragold is indeed a niche material for Omega, Sedna gold is anything but. Named after the red planetoid which was once the furthest observed object of that mass in our solar system, the 18k alloy is a proprietary blend of gold, copper and palladium. Like other rose gold alloys, Sedna owes its distinctive colour to its copper content. The palladium content functions to give the colour long-term stability, much as platinum does in other alloys. While Omega has used Sedna gold aggressively, with the material mostly supplanting traditional rose gold in all collections, Blancpain is currently limiting it to just the Fifty Fathoms Bathyscaphe collection.

It would be remiss of us to neglect Omega’s other precious metal alloy efforts in recent years, which range from Canopus gold to perhaps the best-known of all proprietary blends, Moonshine gold. Of course, there the key messaging was handled by Swatch, which actually used it in a version of the MoonSwatch. We say this is the most widely recognised brand-owned gold alloy because Swatch has a huge reach – the Mission to Moonshine watch is probably one of the most popular Swatch models of 2023 – and it never fails to mention that Moonshine is an Omega trademark.

Honey Gold

Also returning in this updated list is the alloy introduced by A. Lange & Söhne in 2010. It originally appeared in the Homage to F.A. Lange trio of limited edition watches and is known officially as Honeygold; we typically list it as honey gold as a matter of house style. The Glashütte manufacture has been remarkably consistent in keeping the use of honey gold as limited as possible. It was only five years after its auspicious and audacious debut that A. Lange & Söhne decided to roll it out again, this time at Watches and Wonders 2015.

At this Hong Kong precursor to the grand Geneva show, the 1815 200th Anniversary F.A. Lange debuted as a 200-piece limited edition. Subsequently, honey gold has featured in a handful of releases, not all of which are related at all to F. A. Lange. This year, it is the Datograph Perpetual Tourbillon Honeygold Lumen, which features prominently elsewhere this issue. Other key models in this proprietary gold alloy are the Zeitwerk Minute Repeater (last year) and standard Zeitwerk (2021) watches; a second trio of Homage to F.A. Lange watches (2020); and Langematik Perpetual (2019).

Aesthetically, honey gold’s hue falls between its pink and yellow siblings, with a noticeably lower saturation – it is paler, yet redder than yellow gold, and has a marked resemblance to honey (no duh). This alloy’s colour stems from its higher proportions of copper vis-à-vis regular yellow gold, and the addition of zinc; obviously, this is still an 18k alloy so the proportions are in the remaining 25% of the alloy that are not gold.

Honey gold was not developed by A. Lange & Sohne with only aesthetics in mind; this was not even the primary reason. Instead, the manufacture was keen on creating a gold alloy that was more scratch-resistant for its cases. With a hardness of 320 Vickers, honey gold has around twice the hardness of standard 18k yellow gold, which lives in the 150 to 160 Vickers range. The result, by all accounts, is a hardier watch case that is less prone to dings and scratches,

Despite its greater hardness, honey gold is not necessarily more difficult to work. Any equipment that is primed to machine steel cases, which are even harder, is more than capable of handling honey gold; A. Lange & Söhne does not make cases anyway. When used in movement components, however, the material does present challenges to the finisseurs. The Homage to F.A. Lange watches have balance cocks executed in honey gold rather than German silver, as is typically the case. Hand-engraving these pieces with the manufacture’s signature floral motif is thus more difficult and time-consuming, while also requiring a special set of burins with harder blades.

Armour Gold

A recent addition to the parade of proprietary gold alloys, Armour Gold is IWC’s first ride into the realm of precious metals but certainly not its first rodeo in the material innovation circuit. Like many of the watch brands featured here, IWC is known for playing with materials, including being the first top-tier brand to use ceramic for its cases. This became an IWC specialty in some ways, with observers always looking forward to hardy yet aesthetically pleasing materials from the brand’s new releases. In this way, Armour Gold is very much playing to established strengths in IWC’s watches-for-professionals game.

In our chat with the professionals at IWC in Geneva, we got into the substance of Armour Gold, in passing. The gist of it had to do with functional relevance, even when the matter of aesthetics was weightier. So, yes, Armour Gold does purport to live up to its name; in fact, every alloy on this list has some degree of functional distinctiveness, though we did not perform any tests ourselves. IWC introduced its proprietary gold rather quietly, back in 2019; a number of journalists were surprised that Armour Gold was not new for this year.

For IWC, the pertinent qualities of Armour Gold are its resistance to wear and we know the manufacture would not have bothered if it was just to have a different colour. When the material was introduced with the Big Pilot’s Watch Constant-Force Tourbillon Edition Le Petit Prince, the brand noted that it was its first experiment with so-called hard gold. This kind of gold is approximately five to 10 times more wear-resistant than standard red gold. By wear-resistant, we understand this to mean that the material resists scratches better than regular gold alloys. In another press release for a watch that used Armour Gold, the brand noted that it achieves these levels of resistance and hardness thanks to “improved microstructure,” though it is not evident what exactly this means.

At present, IWC only offers nine models in Armour Gold, which includes three novelties this year (Portugieser Perpetual Calendar 44 with black or white dial; and Portugieser Hand-Wound Tourbillon Day & Night).

This article first appeared on WOW’s Autumn Issue #74

For more on the latest in luxury watch reads from WOW, click here.

Everose Gold

These are all complicated points and we will be covering them briefly. We bring this point to the fore because fine watchmaking has been in the public eye itself recently for the investment angle. Specifically, some types of watches might qualify as alternative investment assets. To be clear, we have always argued (or at least cautioned) against this but we acknowledge reality and there are many of you, dear readers, who are intrigued by the potential of watches to not only retain value but also to grow it.

Some years ago, before we dared to comment on the phenomenon of investing in watches, we hinted at what a dark world this might herald. It was an Editor’s Note with the catchy title Watches as Currency and watches cased in precious metal are the personification of this idea. If gold, in particular, is a kind of currency, then wearing watches cased in this material will really be like having cash strapped to one’s wrist. Well perhaps just a digital display that indicates how much the watch in question is valued at. A good way to grab the attention of thieves you say? Welcome to the world of those who rock all-gold watches, and Singapore might just be the safest place on earth to do this.

As a counterpoint, the watch-buying community knows all too well that the best deals available on the secondary market are timepieces cased in precious metals. That means any precious metal, not just gold. To be blunt, these are the types of watches that shed the most value, including examples from the biggest names in Swiss watchmaking. Generally speaking, the why of this is hard to explain, especially versus amped-up valuations on steel watches, but the hypothesis (from specialists, including us) is that the precious metal recommended retail prices have always been too high. This is especially true when any given brand also offers a model in a non-precious metal variant too.

Magic Gold

Hublot flexed its materials science muscle in 2012 with its demonstration of the properties of Magic Gold. While the manufacture was known for its forward-thinking ways prior to this, its fame was tied closely to synthetic materials. Hublot also has a proprietary gold alloy called King Gold, which owes its superior reddish hue to a higher-than-normal mix of copper, but this achievement was dwarfed by the arrival of Magic Gold, a type of metal matrix composite (MMC), which we covered briefly in Summer. Hublot is certainly not the only watch brand experimenting with MMCs but we focus here because Magic Gold is probably the most familiar material for watch cases, and remains a part of the core collection – Cerachrom and Ceragold are a different matter.

When it debuted, Magic Gold promised a golden revolution of sorts because it was meant to be a scratch-resistant gold alloy. It does not take expert knowledge to realise that gold is a relatively soft and dense metal that is prone to scratching – steel is significantly harder but no less of a scratch magnet, as they say in watch collecting circles. Hublot’s mission was to create and deliver a material that would qualify as 18k gold (as most gold watch cases are) that also exhibited a degree of scratch resistance that was all but impossible for a metal alloy. The manufacture decided to add ceramic (either as continuous strands or particulates) to a gold matrix to achieve this end. Nothing like this had been tried before in watchmaking so Hublot turned to the materials science experts at the EPFL in Lausanne. The manufacture has its own research and development facility, but fundamental research is impossible to do in a silo.

The materials specialists began with selecting their raw materials. This included 24k gold, aluminium, and boron carbide – boron carbide is a ceramic and is the third hardest substance known to humans. The proportions used were as follows: 75 percent (gold), three percent (aluminium) and 22 percent (boron carbide). Boron carbide powder is first compacted into a desired shape before being sintered to form a porous solid. Pure molten 24k gold is then forced into these pores under 200 bars of pressure – Hublot once described this as forcing water into a room full of footballs (EuropaStar, 2011). This revealing metaphor indicates that rather than the ceramic being the matrix that holds gold, it is the other way around. This is perfectly in line with Magic Gold being an MMC of course. Needless to say, Magic Gold is harder and more resistant to scratches than traditional gold alloys, while still maintaining the luxurious appearance and properties of gold. How tough is it, exactly? Well, apparently only diamond tools can make a dent in Magic Gold.

To machine Magic Gold, CNC machines equipped with ultrasonic cutters and diamond-tipped tools had to be specially ordered from Germany. Our last update on Magic Gold noted that 28 bezels in Magic Gold took three weeks to machine and that only between 30-40 complete cases could be produced monthly. This is unlikely to have changed as Magic Gold remains truly rare in the Hublot assortment. It is no small thing that this innovation remains in play, and it has had more than 10 years now of testing Magic Gold in the wild. No solution is perfect, and Magic Gold may yet receive an update in the years to come.

Sedna Gold

Qualified honesty has everything to do with why watch brands with big industrial bases tend to flex materials science credentials with creations that advertise their expertise boldly. While Sedna gold was once associated exclusively with Omega, which introduced it in 2013, it is now a staple part of Blancpain offerings too. Needless to say, both brands are a part of the Swatch Group universe and the presence of Sedna gold at both brands is only one marker of the synergies at play. With this fact in mind, we will acknowledge the material developments with precious metals at Omega but would be remiss in our duties as a specialist commentator if we did not note the great work done at Rado, Tissot and Swatch itself in the area of ceramics, composites and polymers (various plastics).

All of the above is just proof positive that Swatch Group knows how to do fundamental research into new materials and how to industrialise the same. While in 2016 we wrote that Omega was making waves with its anti-magnetic movements, today we could report that many Swatch Group brands have followed suit. LiquidMetal, a zirconium-based amorphous alloy that gets inlaid into ceramic bezels using a combination of high heat and high pressure, was also deployed by Omega first, but has since been adopted by Blancpain. When it comes to case materials proper, Omega was also first out of the gate with Ceragold in 2012, which was a combination of ceramic and gold, although not quite rising to the level of Magic Gold.

While Ceragold is indeed a niche material for Omega, Sedna gold is anything but. Named after the red planetoid which was once the furthest observed object of that mass in our solar system, the 18k alloy is a proprietary blend of gold, copper and palladium. Like other rose gold alloys, Sedna owes its distinctive colour to its copper content. The palladium content functions to give the colour long-term stability, much as platinum does in other alloys. While Omega has used Sedna gold aggressively, with the material mostly supplanting traditional rose gold in all collections, Blancpain is currently limiting it to just the Fifty Fathoms Bathyscaphe collection.

It would be remiss of us to neglect Omega’s other precious metal alloy efforts in recent years, which range from Canopus gold to perhaps the best-known of all proprietary blends, Moonshine gold. Of course, there the key messaging was handled by Swatch, which actually used it in a version of the MoonSwatch. We say this is the most widely recognised brand-owned gold alloy because Swatch has a huge reach – the Mission to Moonshine watch is probably one of the most popular Swatch models of 2023 – and it never fails to mention that Moonshine is an Omega trademark.

Honey Gold

Also returning in this updated list is the alloy introduced by A. Lange & Söhne in 2010. It originally appeared in the Homage to F.A. Lange trio of limited edition watches and is known officially as Honeygold; we typically list it as honey gold as a matter of house style. The Glashütte manufacture has been remarkably consistent in keeping the use of honey gold as limited as possible. It was only five years after its auspicious and audacious debut that A. Lange & Söhne decided to roll it out again, this time at Watches and Wonders 2015.

At this Hong Kong precursor to the grand Geneva show, the 1815 200th Anniversary F.A. Lange debuted as a 200-piece limited edition. Subsequently, honey gold has featured in a handful of releases, not all of which are related at all to F. A. Lange. This year, it is the Datograph Perpetual Tourbillon Honeygold Lumen, which features prominently elsewhere this issue. Other key models in this proprietary gold alloy are the Zeitwerk Minute Repeater (last year) and standard Zeitwerk (2021) watches; a second trio of Homage to F.A. Lange watches (2020); and Langematik Perpetual (2019).

Aesthetically, honey gold’s hue falls between its pink and yellow siblings, with a noticeably lower saturation – it is paler, yet redder than yellow gold, and has a marked resemblance to honey (no duh). This alloy’s colour stems from its higher proportions of copper vis-à-vis regular yellow gold, and the addition of zinc; obviously, this is still an 18k alloy so the proportions are in the remaining 25 percent of the alloy that are not gold.

Honey gold was not developed by A. Lange & Sohne with only aesthetics in mind; this was not even the primary reason. Instead, the manufacture was keen on creating a gold alloy that was more scratch-resistant for its cases. With a hardness of 320 Vickers, honey gold has around twice the hardness of standard 18k yellow gold, which lives in the 150 to 160 Vickers range. The result, by all accounts, is a hardier watch case that is less prone to dings and scratches.

Despite its greater hardness, honey gold is not necessarily more difficult to work. Any equipment that is primed to machine steel cases, which are even harder, is more than capable of handling honey gold; A. Lange & Söhne does not make cases anyway. When used in movement components, however, the material does present challenges to the finisseurs. The Homage to F.A. Lange watches have balance cocks executed in honey gold rather than German silver, as is typically the case. Hand-engraving these pieces with the manufacture’s signature floral motif is thus more difficult and time-consuming, while also requiring a special set of burins with harder blades.

Armour Gold

A recent addition to the parade of proprietary gold alloys, Armour Gold is IWC’s first ride into the realm of precious metals but certainly not its first rodeo in the material innovation circuit. Like many of the watch brands featured here, IWC is known for playing with materials, including being the first top-tier brand to use ceramic for its cases. This became an IWC specialty in some ways, with observers always looking forward to hardy yet aesthetically pleasing materials from the brand’s new releases. In this way, Armour Gold is very much playing to established strengths in IWC’s watches-for-professionals game.

In our chat with the professionals at IWC in Geneva, we got into the substance of Armour Gold, in passing. The gist of it had to do with functional relevance, even when the matter of aesthetics was weightier. So, yes, Armour Gold does purport to live up to its name; in fact, every alloy on this list has some degree of functional distinctiveness, though we did not perform any tests ourselves. IWC introduced its proprietary gold rather quietly, back in 2019; a number of journalists were surprised that Armour Gold was not new for this year.

For IWC, the pertinent qualities of Armour Gold are its resistance to wear and we know the manufacture would not have bothered if it was just to have a different colour. When the material was introduced with the Big Pilot’s Watch Constant-Force Tourbillon Edition Le Petit Prince, the brand noted that it was its first experiment with so-called hard gold. This kind of gold is approximately five to 10 times more wear-resistant than standard red gold. By wear-resistant, we understand this to mean that the material resists scratches better than regular gold alloys. In another press release for a watch that used Armour Gold, the brand noted that it achieves these levels of resistance and hardness thanks to “improved microstructure,” though it is not evident what exactly this means.

At present, IWC only offers nine models in Armour Gold, which includes three novelties this year (Portugieser Perpetual Calendar 44 with black or white dial; and Portugieser Hand-Wound Tourbillon Day & Night).

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