Don’t Take It for Granite: Hardstone Dials are Still a Rarity Despite a Massive Spike in Popularity
From the democratic charm of Dennison to the haute horlogerie extravagance of Audemars Piguet and Piaget, the dial has become a hardstone stage.
By Ash Longet
PR & Business Development
I predicted it on the final day of 2024, and I’ll declare it again now: 2025 belongs to stone.
That said, in an industry that turns out some fifteen million Swiss watches a year, those with stone dials form a species so rare it might as well be marked with an asterisk. Even if one were charitable, the figure is unlikely to climb beyond a few tens of thousands annually. In other words, when you see a slice of lapis, malachite, or onyx gracing a dial, remember: it is the exception, not the rule.
Why so few? Because stones, unlike brass or enamel, have personalities. They crack, splinter, and refuse to cooperate. A dial blank that looks perfect in slab form may, once shaved to the necessary paper-thin wafer, crumble like a biscuit in tea.
Then there is supply. Stones are not produced in factories, but quarried, found, and occasionally fought over. Thus, a guaranteed supply of a particular stone (not even accounting for quality) is not by any means a foregone conclusion.
So, let’s discuss the most interesting hardstone dial options.
Onyx
Some of the stones, like onyx, are friendly because they are plentiful and dependable. The lapidary’s old friend, onyx cuts cleanly, polishes to a flawless black, and explains its ubiquity from mainstays like Rolex to newcomers like Dennison.
Think of the recently launched Gérald Genta Minute Repeater executed by the master watchmakers at La Fabrique du Temps. This piece’s softly cushioned 40mm yellow gold case envelops a dial of perfect onyx – a black mirror against which the hands seem to float in space.
The crown, capped with an onyx cabochon, becomes an echo of the dial - a perfect punctuation mark of darkness. Onyx may be common in nature, but rendered in such purity, it becomes something more profound: silence, precision, and luxury distilled to a single hue.
Another, and more accessible, onyx timepiece that might be on your radar lately is the Furlan Marri Disco Volante Onyx Lab Diamonds. The four-piece onyx dial presents an exquisitely mysterious canvas for the technical, minimalist (even with diamond markers) layout of the time-gauging for the main hours and minutes, as well as the elegant small seconds sub-dial at 6 o’clock.
Malachite
Malachite also plays nicely. It yields hypnotic green banding from Africa’s copper-rich soils, a pattern never repeated twice.
When Audemars Piguet chose it for its Code 11.59 Selfwinding Flying Tourbillon, the brand allowed the stone to speak for itself, omitting hour markers, so that those Zambian ripples could radiate outward like tree rings of time.
Lapis Lazuli
As for Lapis, its deep ultramarine blue flecked with pyrite has an almost biblical pedigree. Cleopatra is said to have powdered it for eyeshadow, while Renaissance painters ground it into ultramarine pigment more costly than gold.
Today, the stone finds a more lasting immortality in watches like the Berneron Mirage Lapis Lazuli – its micro-rotor movement floating beneath a dial the color of an Aegean midnight – or the Zenith G.F.J., which turns the same stone into a stage for mechanical bravura.
Now, Gerald Charles joins this lineage of contemporary horological artistry with the Maestro 2.0 Ultra-Thin Lapis Lazuli, unveiled for the Maison’s 25th anniversary. Here, Mr. Gérald Charles Genta’s favorite stone takes center stage once more — transformed into a dial of celestial depth and serene geometry.
Beneath its vibrant surface beats the Manufacture 2.0 calibre, an ultra-thin automatic movement hand-finished to Qualité Fleurier standards, with Côtes de Genève, perlage, colimaçon, and yellow gold engravings.
Opal
Other stones are less obliging. Opal, for instance, is maddeningly fragile. Its shifting colors – a dance of blues, pinks, and greens – are the result of microscopic silica spheres arranged in perfect disorder. But that beauty comes at a cost: opal is so brittle it can fracture under a watchmaker’s breath. That is why Piaget’s opal dials feel like acts of defiance.
The Maison’s Andy Warhol Opal is perhaps the masterpiece of the year - a fever dream of 1970s glamor reborn, its surface like an oil slick of light, its geometry pure Warholian irony: a material that resists time immortalized in a timekeeper.
Turquoise
Meanwhile, turquoise is a stone whose serenity belies its complexity. The finest turquoise – dense, vividly blue, and almost waxy in texture – comes from the long-silent mines of Nishapur (or Neyshabur) in Iran or from Sleeping Beauty in Arizona. Most turquoise today is stabilized, its pores filled with resin to survive the lapidary’s saw.
That said, Audemars Piguet, Piaget, and Rolex, in their most opulent expressions, use unstabilized (i.e., natural) stone: the kind that can take a polish and hold its color for decades. For example, the Rolex Day-Date “Turquoise Dial” (ref. 128238) recalls a Mediterranean summer immortalized in metal - that rare moment when precision engineering meets sunlit sensuality.
And still the undisputed king of stone dials remains Piaget. And the brand’s recent Sixtie Turquoise Sautoir united jewelry and horology in a single swing of bohemian splendor, recalling an era when wrists were golden and stones were worn like declarations of joy.
Sodalite
Blue with white calcite veins that make every dial an exercise in acceptance, sodalite is less brittle than opal or turquoise, but it is still temperamental. Enter Biver’s Carillon Tourbillon Titanium Sodalite.
Here, sodalite becomes a cathedral window, catching and scattering light around the three-gong tourbillon. Its titanium case makes the dial’s blue seem almost weightless, a reminder that even the most ancient stones can feel startlingly modern when paired with the right resonance.
Coral
And then there is coral, which was once the great orange flame of Rolex Day-Dates. Today, precious coral dials have all but slipped into legend, not through lack of taste but through lack of supply because harvesting red and pink corals is now heavily restricted under international conservation treaties, their collection tightly monitored to preserve endangered reefs.
Thus, what surfaces in Rolex CPO today are not freshly dredged branches from the Mediterranean, but vintage slabs that have been cut and stowed away decades ago, glowing with the patina of an era when hedonism wore a crown of gold. A coral dial is not merely a watch; it’s a relic of ecology and glamor alike.
Aventurine
Finally, one must mention a beautiful impostor: Aventurine. Technically not a stone at all, but a Murano-born glass infused with copper filings that shimmer like stars. Its charm lies not in its rarity but in the alchemy of effect – a midnight sky sealed in soda-lime.
Artisans de Genève understood this when they created their bespoke Ventura Project, transforming the Rolex Daytona into a cosmic tableau. As glass pretending to be a galaxy, aventurine is no doubt captivating. Still, it isn’t stone.
