Diamonds have long offered women—and increasingly, men—a way to jazz up a wristwatch. Sprinkled on a dial or bezel, the gems add instant elegance, even to the most basic of tool watches.
Lately, however, the icy look has literally and metaphorically paled in comparison with another gem-centric trend: timepieces set with colored stones. The category contains two occasionally overlapping sub-categories: watches featuring hard stone dials and those peppered with faceted gems, such as a rainbow assortment of pavé sapphires.
Gerard Charles Maestro 2.0 Ultra-Thin Lapis Lazuli watch
The look of hard stone dials was first popularized in the 1970s, when watchmakers embraced a groovy palette of gems, from coral to tiger’s eye, to lend their timepieces a chic, one-of-a-kind appeal. Now, those pieces are fetching premiums on the secondary market.
“Stone dials, like rare Rolex Day-Dates and Piagets, have become very popular,” Max Abbott, a co-founder of the vintage watch dealer The Keystone, tells Gem & Jewel. “They are interesting to collectors for their rarity and beauty—in a world where we have become jaded seeing champagne and silver dial Day-Dates, stone dials are something very different and offer a real pop of color and flair.”
They also offer quite a bit of variety. With their saturated green and blue hues, malachite and turquoise are two very fashionable stone choices. But the selection of dial materials is almost as vast as the world of color. It includes agate, aventurine, coral, jasper, lapis lazuli, meteorite, mother-of-pearl, obsidian, onyx, and tiger’s eye.
Ball Engineer III Invigorating Serpent watch with malachite dial
Modern makers have jumped on the trend, too. In January, Ball Watch introduced a Year of the Snake model, the Engineer III Invigorating Serpent, set against the backdrop of a vivid green malachite dial (shown above). That same month, Gerald Charles, another Swiss maker, unveiled the Maestro 2.0 Ultra-Thin Lapis Lazuli, the first watch in its history to bear a hard stone dial. Not to be outdone, Arnold & Son in February introduced a minimalist version of its 38 mm HM Steel model featuring a dial made of pale yellow Baltic amber (below).
Arnold & Son HM Steel with Baltic amber dial
And that’s barely scratching the surface of the gem-set watch universe. For watch lovers keen to make a bigger statement, timepieces set with faceted stones—typically sapphires, but also rubies, tourmalines, and garnets—are gaining traction, in both the vintage and modern arenas.
In January, during LVMH Watch Week, Zenith introduced the $112,100 Chronomaster Sport Rainbow, an 18k white gold sports watch set with a colorful array of 50 baguette-cut gemstones, totaling 3.9 carats, on its bezel and hour markers (below).
Zenith Chronomaster Sport Rainbow
At the same event, Gerald Genta debuted its most flamboyant creation yet, the Oursin Fire Opal. Like the sea urchin for which it’s named, the limited edition has a spiky round case dotted with 137 beads of the orange-red Mexican opal, an homage to the sunny beaches of Corsica, where Genta, the legendary watch designer whose eponymous brand was revived by LVMH in 2023, first became enchanted by the spiny shells of sea urchins (below).
Gerald Genta's Oursin Fire Opal watch
While both of the models cited above are brand new, the gem-set tradition owes a huge debt to four brands that began turning out gem-centric styles in the late 1960s: Patek Philippe, Cartier, Audemars Piguet and, especially, Rolex, whose history of adorning its sports models in festive colored stones found its greatest expression in the mid-1980s with its SARU models, an abbreviation that refers to GMT timepieces boasting bezels set with “SApphires and RUbies.”
Above and at top: A vintage Rolex SARU with sapphires and rubies
Like virtually all of Rolex’s stone dial models, SARU timepieces are highly sought after—and not by the usual suspects. “The collectors of these jeweled watches would surprise you,” Abbott says. “Of course, they include people who love diamonds and flash, but we often sell our gem-set watches to conservative-looking men who enjoy the flair, craftsmanship and rarity. It might be the only piece of flash in their world, so they like to let loose and enjoy it.
“The rarity component is a big part as well,” he adds. “Most of these iconic Swiss brands produce a very small fraction of a model with gem settings. In some cases, the gem-set examples are one-of-one and entirely unique.”
That fact, combined with their unexpected playfulness and charm—in a way, so very un-Swiss-like, given the luxury watch industry’s reputation for upholding tradition—make gem-studded wristwatches inherently seductive. Our advice? Catch one if you can.
