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
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