Get some new materials – a guide to the watch world’s latest innovations

Watches used to be made from a limited palette of materials – steel, gold, maybe platinum if you were feeling fancy. Rado introduced ceramic into the mix in 1962 with its DiaStar, but that was about as technical as it got. The watch material landscape is very different now. As well as a whole host of proprietary golds from the likes of Hublot, Rolex and Omega, brands, inspired by, in some case partnerships with other industries, have headed back into the lab to create materials that are stronger, lighter, less corrosive, more scratch resistant. Here’s a guide to some substances that are shaking up the industry.

Ceratanium

Debuted on the 50th anniversary of the IWC Aquatimer in 2018 and revisited most recently in 2024’s Pilot’s Watch Performance Chronograph 41 launched to pay special tribute to the Mercedes Formula One team led by Lewis Hamilton and George Russell, this alloy is a combination of titanium and ceramic. Created especially for IWC, Ceratanium is as light and tough as titanium, but also has the scratch-resistance and hardness of ceramic.

Ceramic is a tricky material to work with, because, during the sintering process, it shrinks by about a third, which affects the miniscule tolerances with which watchmakers work. It also can’t be machined after sintering because that could cause it to split. The addition of titanium changes all that. Ceratanium cases are milled, turned, drilled, and polished into their finished shape before they are put in the oven. The sintering process causes a structural change in the alloy that causes the ceramic-like surface to bond directly with the body material, which gives it its distinctive black, hard, and scratch-resistant surface.

Carbonium

Rummaging around the aeronautical industry’s offcuts is Ulysse Nardin for its carbon composite – carbonium – and its glitzier sister, carbonium gold. UN has been using these since 2019, but most recently in its Diver Net Ops and the Diver X Skeleton Ops. It has also been used by independent watchmaker Roman Gauthier in his Insight Micro-Rotor Squelette, which was created for the marque’s 15th anniversary.

Created by French start-up Lavoisier Composite, carbonium is made from carbon fibres that have an intermediate stiffness (apparently carbon fibres can also be standard or high-strength when it comes to this particular quality) and a high-temperature epoxy that are thermo-compressed to create the new composite. To get the gold version, particles of the precious metal are dispersed within a thermo-setting matrix, subjected to high temperature and pressure, which results in an appearance that mimics walnut burl. Lavoisier Composite sources 95% of the materials used from the aeronautical industry, and by using offcuts rather than creating virgin material, carbonium is also between 40% and 50% more eco-friendly to make thanks to its CO2-saving manufacturing process.

Carbon glass

Girard-Perregaux used carbon glass for the case of its 2019 Laureato Absolute Rock, and has keep the details of how it’s made to a minimum. As its name may suggest, carbon glass is made from those two materials, creating a case whose pattern is unique to each watch as it’s dependent on how the glass and carbon are compressed. Formed by extreme compression at high temperatures, it’s 100 times harder than steel but incredibly light, has a density of close to 1 t/m³, so it could float on water, and is also impermeable due to the compression of the material yielding an extremely regular and homogenous structure, which is perfectly sealed.

Bulk metallic glass

Audemars Piguet used this intriguing multicomponent alloy on its Royal Oak Jumbo Extra-Thin from 2023 and Panerai before that in 2020 for its Submersible, using it for its case. Thanks to its disordered atomic structure and supercooling transition from liquid to solid, bulk metallic glasses are extremely strong. BMG can also be combined with other materials such as titanium in Panerai’s case, or palladium in AP’s, to enhance such things as the material’s anti-corrosive properties. To make something out of bulk metallic glass, the material is melted, and then poured into moulds before being rapidly cooled, just for a few seconds, which stops the atoms from reforming into a regular structure, instead leaving them in a randomly aligned state. This glass is 70% more scratch resistant than titanium, lighter than steel, and displays a superior resistance to corrosion and shocks.

Carbon TPT

Created in association with North Thin Ply Technology (NTPT), Richard Mille’s carbon TPT uses layers of carbon composite 30 microns thick – less than a human hair. Thirty layers of these are needed to make one millimetre of material. They are laid flat and impregnated with resin, with all the fibres going in the same direction, giving you a sheet of fibres that can be unrolled. Next, the layers are stacked at 45-degree angles to each other to create a block with isotropic properties on all planes, meaning strength and stiffness are the same when measured along different axes. These stacked layers are then put into autoclaves, exposing them to a vacuum to remove any air pockets before curing under 100ºC heat and at a pressure of five to seven bars. Recently, Richard Mille has improved on its carbon TPT with a new version that is 4% denser, 15% more rigid and 30% more resistant.

Quartz TPT

Another Richard Mille invention, this time combining quartz with carbon; the former for aesthetics, the latter for strength. This is actually a three-way collaboration between NTPT, Saint-Gobain (a French manufacturing company that supplied the quartz-fibre filament), and Reichhold (a British company that supplied the monomer-free vinyl hybrid resin). The fibres start out as purified ground quartz crystals, which are then fused with heat and pressure to create quartz rods that are pulled and squashed under oxy-hydrogen flames to create long fibres of fused quartz. The quartz fibres are layered with carbon fibres to make sheets. The layering and heating process is the same as carbon, but this material is heated at 120ºC and the pressure is six to eight bar. This has allowed Richard Mille to play with colour, including 2024’s RM 65-01 in a pretty pastel blue and a fiery yellow.

Chroma Forged Technology

Recently debuted within the latest Royal Oak Concept, Audemars Piguet unveiled a new patented process it calls CFT (Chroma Forged Technology). As Zach mentioned in his article, CFT allows Audemars Piguet to “colour the carbon fibres directly instead of the resin, and arrange them as desired in the component produced.” This more hands-on approach to fabricating a forged carbon case allows for tailored injections of not only colour but also luminescent material as well.

Audemars Piguet explains: “The manufacturing process involves numerous steps and great expertise. The carbon fibres are first cut into small pieces and coloured with pigments. A multitude of colours is possible, allowing for a wide range of creative developments. The coloured carbon pieces are then manually placed in a mould according to the intended design and completed with resin. This process is repeated to build several layers like a mille-feuille pastry. The content of the mould is then compressed to obtain a block free of air bubbles. Finally, the mixture is placed in an autoclave to be cured under pressure for about ten hours to reveal the properties of the resin, and produce a carbon block that is then machined for six to eight hours to create the final component. As the blending stages are carried out by hand, each case middle produced has a slightly different motif, making it a unique piece that seamlessly combines cutting-edge technology and the expertise of the Le Brassus artisans.”