If you wanted a clock during the Renaissance, you were getting one with an enamel dial.
You lucky duck. Enamel dials are stunning. Not that you would’ve known from Adam — back then, watchmakers didn’t have the necessary tools to create the discs of raw metal we all associate with watch dials today.
Modern watchmaking has flipped things around: enamel-dialed watches today are rare and expensive rather than the norm. That’s because they are, as we once wrote, “a pain in the ass to make.”
The process of making an enamel dial can take a few forms. “Grand feu,” as some call it, is the most common for an entire enamel dial; it involves baking multiple layers of glass powder atop silver or copper. Cloisonné and champlevé involve melting the enamel inside of a wire frame, or painting it onto the metal, respectively. All versions take a lot of time and effort; in watchmaking, as in much else in life, that translates to a high price for the consumer.
The market bears this cost for a simple reason: enamel dials are uniquely gorgeous. “Nothing else renders color like enamel does,” says Lewis Heath, the founder of anOrdain. “It’s essentially stained glass.”
AnOrdain and a few other brands represent a new turn in enamel: using it in funky, modern designs, and ones that don’t necessarily cost an arm and a leg. Using enamel in such a way bucks the tradition of its use in ultra-high-end luxury watches, and can bring the material to the masses like never before.
Here are some of our favorite watches that use enamel, both on the “affordable” end and the high-end luxury side of things.
