Light as air, tough as diamond: A five-minute guide to ceramic watches
Watchmaker's ceramic is the toughest material on your wrist — and it's never looked better.
Colours come in and out of fashion, but black is forever. While the rest of the watch world spent the last two years dabbling in sorbet — Rolex's Oyster Perpetual in matte pastels, TAG Heuer's Formula 1 Solargraph in pastel green and lavender-blue — TUDOR was working on something completely different.
Its monochrome Black Bay Ceramic (£6,030) is not only eye-catching, it’s the company’s first model with a fully ceramic bracelet, designed to match the 41-millimetre, matte ceramic case and satin-finish charcoal dial. It has a self-winding mechanical movement, a 70-hour power reserve and is waterproof to 660 feet.
Ceramic, for the uninitiated, is a nightmare to work with — it doesn't bend to a maker’s will the way steel does — so building an entire bracelet from it, clasp included (above), is a notable feat of patience and engineering.
The Black Bay follows in the footsteps of some notable timepiece titans: the CHANEL J12, which is credited with transforming ceramic’s reputation from obscure technical material into something fashionable and luxurious; Omega Speedmaster Dark Side of the Moon; Hublot Big Bag Integral Ceramic; and Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar in black ceramic, which is one of the more impressive examples of ceramic being used in haute horlogerie.
Short on time? Here are five things you need to know about watchmaking ceramic:
- On the Mohs scale, ceramic scores a nine — bested only by diamond. On the Vickers hardness scale, ceramic measures around 2,300, compared with just 200 for standard stainless steel. However, ceramic is more brittle than steel, gold and titanium, and can crack or splinter on a hard impact — so it's wonderfully scratch-proof, but not indestructible
- The ceramic used in modern watchmaking is closer to the ceramic NASA uses to protect satellites and spacecraft from extreme heat than it is to the ceramic in your kitchen crockery. It's produced by superheating materials like silica until molten, then cooling and milling them into shape — a world away from a potter's wheel
Hublot's new Big Bang Reloaded UEFA Champions League Titanium Ceramic watch features a polished titanium and blue ceramic bezel and a satin-finished, blue ceramic case back. It's limited to 100 pieces and costs £19,700.
- Rolex doesn't use standard ceramic at all — they've developed a patented alloy called Cerachrom. Others have gone further still: Omega blends ceramic with gold to create Ceragold, while Hublot has Magic Gold — both designed to stop soft gold from scratching by fusing it with something nearly indestructible
- Despite feeling like a thoroughly modern material, the first ceramic watches actually date back to the mid 20th century. It took until the mid 1980s for the technology and material science to mature enough for ceramic to become genuinely attractive to watchmakers at scale
- Ceramic is hypoallergenic — good news for anyone with a nickel allergy who can't wear stainless steel. It’s also highly UV-resistant, meaning it won't fade or discolour even after years in direct sunlight, unlike gold or dyed materials
