Opinion: Everybody Must Get Stoned? What’s Going On with the Stone Dial Trend?

Let me take you back to October of 2023. It’s Windup weekend in New York City, and throngs of collectors and enthusiasts have converged on the Altman Building, our old home in Chelsea, to check out new watches from dozens and dozens of brands. That year, I was particularly interested in a new watch from Fears, the Brunswick Aurora, which was unlike anything they’d made up until that point. Yes, it had the familiar Brunswick 40mm case, but the dial was and still is among the most evocative I’ve ever seen. Crafted from multiple pieces of a particularly dynamic mother-of-pearl, I was transfixed and knew that this would be the Fears watch I’d eventually own. I made good on that hunch a few months later, and wrote about my ownership experience in a fairly extensive way. It remains one of my most worn and loved watches.  

Years later, I can’t help but think of the Aurora as a point where something shifted. I’m sure there were other MOP and stone dials popping up in unexpected ways by that time, but that’s the one that got me, so the memory of that particular moment in watch culture feels very fresh. Since then, we’ve seen a deluge of watches with mother-of-pearl and stone dials that sometimes makes me wonder if we’ve time traveled back to a more groovy era. The saturation of these things in the market, at every conceivable price range, is unlike any trend I’ve witnessed in my years writing about watches professionally. And I’m here to say: we have to make it stop. 

It pains me somewhat to come to that conclusion, but we can’t continue like this! I mean, we can continue like this. Stones used for watchmaking purposes are obviously quite plentiful and there should not be any illusions at this point that any brand can’t simply pick these things out of a lookbook pretty cheaply. But for the good of the community, the sanity of my brain and my inbox, and for young enthusiasts who might not fully understand the arc of history when it comes to stone dials, we need to dial it back. Back to pre-2023, when using organic materials in a dial was still newsworthy and could differentiate a brand from their competitors. 

Let me say that in principle, I love stone dials. I particularly enjoy mother-of-pearl, which is not stone, but gets dragged into the conversation enough to make it worthwhile to lump them in with your lapis, tiger’s eye, and so forth. Not to be annoying about it, but I’ve loved this stuff before it was cool. I had stone dials on vinyl, I guess. I liked it when it was weird. 

It’s no longer weird at this point. Stone dials are truly just a variant to choose from across a surprising number of watches from both large and small brands. You can have a black dial, a blue dial, a green dial (the stone dial of 2022, IYKYK), or some crazy, hard to pronounce stone dial. 

The reality of this is probably a good thing, in the aggregate. I like the idea of having more to choose from. It’s consumer friendly. 

What’s become tiresome, however, is the lazy slapping of stone dials into watches as an afterthought, or an attempt to capture revenue via a trend. Few brands have been able to resist the stone dial option as a new release strategy in these last few years. A lot of these watches look very, very nice. But collectively, they’ve diminished the stone dial niche by oversaturation. They are simply not a niche anymore. And they’ve come at us so fast that even people like me who are inclined to enjoy watches of this ilk are simply fatigued by seeing so many versions of the same thing. I find myself doing a type of math in my head, attempting to figure out if there are in fact any brands left that have not given stone dials a try, hoping against hope that they’ve all had their turn until the next press release turns up in my inbox with yet another take on onyx or carnelian (honestly, I’d love to see more carnelian). 

There are a handful of brands that do this right, however, and approach stone dials with some restraint and authenticity. Dennison comes immediately to mind, with an aesthetic that is deeply rooted in the 1970s, when stone dials were at their (first) peak. Baltic, too, does a nice job integrating stone dials into their vintage inspired aesthetic, particularly with the Prismic collection. 

And I’d like to give a special shout out to Toledano & Chan, a brand that could have very easily fallen into the trap being “the stone dial brand,” but wisely adjusted course with the b/1.3r released earlier this year. When I talked to Phil Toledano about the development of the b/1.3r, he explained that it was originally intended to be another watch with a stone dial, but they ultimately decided to create something new after observing that stone dials had simply become a commodity for small brands. “Where’s the creativity in picking something out of a catalog?” Phil asked me, rhetorically, I think, when I spoke with him. 

By using inexpensive stone dials in mass produced watches with big markups, brands are effectively sub-leasing creativity to mother nature and counting on Instagram algorithms to do their thing to sell these watches to trend spotting collectors. Any individual watch, of course, might look great, but the sudden influx of stone dials on the market represents a broad laziness across a huge spectrum of brands. 

A few weeks ago, in Stephen Pulvirent’s newsletter “The Enthusiasts” which he co-writes with Justin Hast, the provocative subject line of a recent entry read “More brands should be like Hublot.” It’s a good read, and while stone dials were not mentioned, Stephen’s points about (and defense of) Hublot struck a chord, and feels relevant. “In an atmosphere where the vast majority of the watch industry is chasing trends, battling for the same group of customers, and homogenizing taste,” he writes, “Hublot is an antidote to all the sameness.”

The sameness, at the moment, is the spectre of the stone dial. I’m not sure if Hublot is necessarily the antidote to this particular trend, but I’m ready for whatever is next. 

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