This is the year of the white ceramic watch. And now that summer is around the corner, it’s time we take a hard look at what’s out there. Ceramic is a hard material to work with, experts explain, and white is one of the most challenging colours to achieve. Plus it’s a bold aesthetic choice, and not for everyone.
“The clients that buy these watches, they are not the standard customers,” says Lorenz Brunner, the head of research and innovation at IWC Schaffhausen. “Because really, if you wear it on your wrist, it looks quite offensive.”
And yet, this year, IWC came out with both a Pilot’s Watch Chronograph and a Perpetual Calendar ProSet in its Le Petit Prince line, a continuing partnership between the Swiss watchmaker and the descendants of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of the beloved The Little Prince books. Those watches always have dark blue dials, to evoke the night sky. The white ceramic, Brunner says, was a really good match with this tone.
Brunner also masterminded one of the strangest and most talked-about watches I saw at the Watches and Wonders fair: the Big Pilot’s Watch Perpetual Calendar Ceralume. A perpetual calendar is a complicated timepiece that can track the day, date, month and moonphase – across different-length months and even leap years. This means there’s a lot to display on the dial. And yet for the Ceralume, almost every element on the face is white, which makes it hard to decipher in the daylight.
It was made that way because the designers wanted the watch to glow in the dark – incredibly brightly, and for a long time. That meant mixing a high-potency Super-LumiNova powder into the ceramic powder when the watch was sintered, the process of fusing together powders into a solid through high heat. “You cannot blend Super-LumiNova in a dark colour like black ceramics, for example, it would just absorb too much light,” Brunner says. This meld of ceramic and luminescent material gave the watch its name, Ceralume.
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