Stone dials are making a comeback: here are the watches doing it best

Once, it was a feature only associated with the most louche horological creations – and for the majority of the last few decades, something only the most connected collectors could get their hands on. But recently, watches with hard-stone dials have experienced a surge in popularity, spreading far beyond their glam origins to populate every corner of watchmaking, from plucky start-ups to sports-watch specialists, as well as the most exclusive new independent brands.

What’s a stone dial?

It might be worth taking a moment to understand what is, and isn’t, a ‘stone dial’. Typically, the term refers to watches whose dials are made from semi-precious stones, cut to a thin slice and polished to reveal the mineral’s beauty. Some people include mother-of-pearl (cut from mollusc’s shells) and meteorite in the category; meteorite is also fundamentally stone – rocks rich in iron ore that when acid-treated and polished reveal a jagged geometric pattern – but there is a distinction between this and the mined stones that watchmakers normally use, such as malachite, lapis lazuli, onyx, tiger’s eye and aventurine.

Stone-dial watches’ new-found popularity is no surprise when you consider the shift away from 1960s and 1970s sports watches towards the ‘cocktail hour’ timepieces typical of the late 1970s and 1980s, over the last couple of years. No brand is closer to the prevailing mood than Piaget, which, accordingly, relaunched its Black Tie model at the end of 2024.

The watch had previously been colloquially known as ‘the Andy Warhol’ thanks to its prominence in the artist’s extensive collection of watches. Now the name has been formally adopted and the watch revamped to be even thinner and dressier than before. A new edition features a clous de Paris textured finish on its broad, shallow-stepped flanks as well as a blue meteorite dial; but the mineral treasures don’t stop there. Customers are also invited, says Piaget, to create a custom watch, with ten options for precious stone dials on offer.

It’s no less than you’d expect from one of the original jeweller-watchmakers. But stone dials are also cropping up at brands better known for simple sports watches; over the last few years, Omega has introduced malachite and lapis lazuli dials into its Seamaster 300 collection, alongside aventurine and meteorite Constellation pieces. Hublot, this autumn, partnered with Singapore retailer The Hour Glass to release a set of five Classic Fusion watches with stone dials, limited to ten pieces each, with dials in pink jasper, turquoise, sodalite, nephrite jade and lunar meteorite. It would be a stretch to say the collection surprised fans, given Hublot’s propensity for embracing a wide variety of styles, but it wasn’t something we could have envisaged a year or two ago.

What really was surprising, and pleasantly so, was the appearance of hard-stone dials at Frederique Constant, a brand not known for its daring and indulgent personality, but the Classic Moonphase was revitalised by the addition of a malachite dial, with its vivid green irregular stripes. The ability of such stones to provide an organic, abstract, infinitely varied dial pattern, distinct from machined finishes or the uniformity offered by enamel and lacquer, is their greatest asset.

This exclusivity, coupled with the minerals’ inherent rarity and the difficulty of machining solid stone into a dial that may then need holes cutting in it for the hands, hour markers and so on, has traditionally accounted for high price points and low volumes. And although that remains the case at many brands, there are also independent watchmakers producing enthralling stone-dialled watches for comparatively affordable sums.

Pivoting adroitly away from tool watches, French cult brand Baltic stunned collectors with a run of stone-dial watches in its Prismic collection. The colours seemed more intense than any other stone dials around, particularly the volcanic orange of its red agate. Elsewhere, one of 2024’s most hotly observed start-ups, Toledano & Chan, launched its debut design, the B/1, with a lapis lazuli dial. For the revival of British casemaking name Dennison, the brand chose to launch a series of quartz-powered ellipse-shaped dress watches with tigers’ eye, lapis lazuli, malachite and aventurine. For £557, they offer a touch of smoky-nightclub-era Piaget for a fraction of the price.

Others have latched onto the power a well-chosen stone can have when it comes to evolving an existing collection. Arguably the biggest launch of the year for seasoned watch nerds was that of Berneron, the eponymous brand from the hitherto-unknown former Breitling creative director Sylvain Berneron. Majoring on unconventional design and uncompromising mechanics, it had world-weary watch aficionados swooning. But for the second act, delivered mere months after the first, Berneron shrunk the case size and swapped its iconoclastic wobbly numerals for a plain stone dial. The twist was that each dial featured a small seconds display that had been painstakingly recessed, a challenging approach with such a brittle material.

It was a similar story at Biver, which launched into the horological firmament in 2023 with a jaw-dropping (and jaw-droppingly expensive) minute repeater. Following that in 2024 with a simple, automatic watch could have resulted in a substantial anticlimax, but the answer was obvious: launch the watches with mesmerising stone dials. Naturally, they were a hit.