Hello everybody today, we're going to be talking about stone dials. That is
the inclusion of naturally occurring gemstones within a watch.
Welcome back everybody. So like I said today, we're going to be talking about gemstones and
watches. Now gemstones are going to be crystals that have an aesthetic value that are generally
faceted. And of course, by faceted, I am talking about just the shape that the stone is cut into.
Most often we can think of like the princess cut on a diamond. Those are
going to be different facets. And so when they do that to any sort of stone, it becomes
more than just a crystal. They actually gave it a different title,
a different name. They call them gemstones. Now I do want to go into it a little bit because
crystals are not rocks. They're not rocks. There is a difference between the two. It's not one of
these like square rectangle conversations. Rocks by definition cannot be crystals and vice versa.
So crystals can be found in rocks and small amounts, but the very nature of
how the crystal is molecularly structured makes it impossible for it to be a rock.
So, as I mentioned, crystals, the way that they actually are formed,
of course it is natural, but crystals get their term, get their name from the way that
the molecular structure is aligned. It takes on a crystal clean appearance, which really just
has to do with like how the molecules bond to one another. And they follow a very rigid pattern as
it, as it grows, if you will. It's very similar to like water. If you think about water being on
like a flat surface and you kind of puddle it, it's going to be perfectly round. Of course,
without gravity, it would be spherical, but here on planet Earth, we do have gravity.
But if you add water and you're shooting water into the side of a little pool of water that
you have, it's not going to slowly get longer from the direction that you're adding water.
Once it becomes a part of the bigger pool, the whole thing, reshapes and maintains that same
shape. And so crystals operate very similarly as they grow in size, they maintain this rigid
structure that becomes very apparent. When you're looking at a significant amount of molecules, you
think of like, like a quartz crystal it's found naturally in the world. It's not just going to be
looking like rock. It's going to have sharp, flat edges. It comes to sharp points on the side. So it
does it's very easy to see how these crystals do differentiate from rocks. Now, how they're made.
That's one thing that's very important because crystals, some of them are harder than others.
They obviously all have different properties, different colors, but how do you get it from
in the ground into a watch? Of course they don't grow, or they're not made in exact shape,
a perfect slim disk that has cuts right out of it where you can insert an hour markers, some hands
or a different complication. So how do they do it? They take larger pieces of these crystals. And the
first thing they do is they cut them into sheets. And so they get them to the appropriate thickness.
First from there they're generally like hand polished to like arrive at the appropriate sheen
or like the level of shininess that the artist or the person that's working on the crystal is,
is hoping to achieve from there. They're actually cut into the shapes that you're going to be using.
And after they cut them into whether it's a square rectangle, you can see this.
Piaget has a rather unique inclusion of multiple crystals, but they're not perfectly spherical.
They're not perfectly square. They, you can't cut them into whatever shape you want. Now, once
you cut it, though, you still have to get you got to get all the things that make a watch, a watch
included. It's not just a piece of round stone. That's laid over a piece of metal.
There's a lot of functionality that goes in. So obviously once they have the dial itself, they
have to drill a small hole so that you can attach the hands and actually have the functionings of a
watch. And then if it's got a date feature, you're going to have to make another incision to be able
to have that window view through it. Same with all the hour markers, they have to be a fixed somehow.
Well, every time you make an incision on one of these rocks, you jeopardize — oh man,
I called it a rock. Every time you make an incision on one of these crystals,
you're going to be jeopardizing the structural integrity of it and you could actually crack
it. So it's a very intricate process when they do it. And it's one of the reason that we don't see a
whole lot of these. It is a very extensive process and can be quite expensive, especially depending
on which crystal you're looking at. Now, if you go back through history, crystals have a very
long history within our culture just as humans. You can think back to like the Jade statues and
jewelry of like ancient China. Now there are a lot of alleged metaphysical properties that
we could dive into regarding crystals. That is not the purpose of this video.
I am not here to either confirm or deny it. We'll save that for Reddit and all the other
places where we can, you can really go deep down the rabbit hole when it comes to crystals.
But at the, at the root of those arguments, there is actually some science that comes
from frequencies that can be scientifically proven that resonate from these crystals.
And so very similar to like colors. If you think about a light wave, right, you can
look at the frequency of white and like the red spectrum is going to have a very low frequency.
And as you kind of move up in the colors of the rainbow, the frequency
increases. So it's more vibrations or a greater frequency per the same amount of time. And of
course that does change the color of it, but it also is relevant within the crystals themselves.
So you think about quartz, right? That's a very common crystal. Most people are aware of it.
And this kind of brings it full circle back to watches because if you go back to the late sixties
and really the seventies, anybody that's familiar with the history of watchmaking is going to know
about the quartz crisis. And what was that about? So the quartz crisis was when watchmakers
found a way to use quartz as a crystal, run electricity through it and create a higher,
higher level of accuracy within timekeeping. And so that it's also much cheaper to produce
like a quartz movement versus like a hand wound or a mechanical movement. And it really took
the world by storm. I mean, a lot of these major manufacturers we're concerned. I mean,
there was a lot of fear in the air that the idea of having the hand while mechanical watch
was going to become a relic of the past and not necessarily kind of like horses, right?
We still love horses. We still ride them. But if I'm going to go to the grocery store,
I'm not, I'm not going to hop on my horse. I'm going to hop in my car. It makes a little bit
more sense. And so they rightfully had a whole lot of concern about this quartz.
Now, how does that work? Like I said, they run an electrical current through the crystal,
but because of the rigid structure of how the crystalling like molecular structure is, they
behave very specifically within our natural world. And so when you run electricity through a quartz,
it actually vibrates at a very specific frequency. You often see like 288 talking about vibrations
per hour. Well, the quartz has a very specific frequency as well. And so I just wanted to kind
of bring that up so you could understand that there is more to it than just colors.
You know, there's a lot of elements of the watch of the crystal itself, that when to
what you're getting, when you buy one of these and actually wear it,
now let's go into some of the different types of stone dials that you can get. And I do want to
kind of throw a little caveat on there. This is part two of our gem video. I want to say Blake
did a video earlier this year. So this is going to be in 2021. If you don't know who Blake is,
he's the gentleman with no hair up here, but a full beard down here. So if you scroll
through the videos in the past, you can find another video on gemstones on stone dials.
Of course, as our inventory revolves, we've had different stone dials come in.
So we wanted to kind of elaborate it and show you some more of what's available out there.
Now, for starters, I'm going to start down at the bottom here. I've got a couple of Jade dials. Now
one of these is going to be considered Jade and the other is jadeite. And so what's the
difference. This is one of those square and rectangle things. All jadeite is considered Jade,
but not all Jade is considered jadeite. And the reason is that Jade and it's in and of itself
comes from two different minerals. You know, it can be derived from two different types
of minerals, whereas jadeite is just one of them. So if you're trying to
compare between the two, they do have very similar color schemes that you can see,
but jadeite is going to be a harder stone. So we've done videos about diamonds having
a most hardness scale up there and like 10 and then Sapphire coming right below it at 9,
or jadeite hangs around in the 7-7.5 and Jade just naturally comes in the 6.
So if you're looking for either one of them, they are absolutely gorgeous stones.
Obviously you can see that they are primarily going to be represented by green, but you can
get a few different varieties of Jade that do have other color inclusions in them as well. And so I
do want to talk about a couple of other stones. So here we've got sodalite and lapis lazuli. Now
these two crystals are very commonly misconstrued. They get mixed up a lot,
even when you're out and you're trying to source maybe some crystals. If you have a collection,
you can often find sellers getting these confused and misadvertising them and labeling them
as the other one. Well, I want to kind of give you some hints as to how to spot the differences
between the two for starters sodalite is going to appear a little bit darker.
So I'm not sure if the lighting's going to let you see that, but just know that
a sodalite dial is going to have a darker hue of blue than a lapis lazuli dial. Now the lap is also
generally has golden flakes and that's going to come from pyrite, but if you're actually up close
and personal on the dial or on the crystal, you'll notice that there are other colors
that kind of gets thrown in as well with the lapis. Now we do have another blue dial up here,
and this is going to be aventurine. Now aventurine is a member of the quartz family,
and it gets its color from minor inclusions and copper. So know that within, within the spectrum
of blue, there are plenty of options to choose from. A lot of them have a lot of properties
that that a lot of the people do desire, not only just in a watch, but obviously jewelry.
We use a lot of stones when we're wearing other jewelry. And if you like to wear those natural
items, then having a watch can, without an inclusion of a, of a stone dial, it can kind
of take away from the rest of the, the appeal or appearance that you're going for it. You know,
if you've got crystals on bracelets, or if you're wearing stones or crystals in your earrings, and
you just have a watch that's made out of metal, it doesn't really go with the vibe. And of course we
can use vibes because these give off frequencies. So good vibrations for everyone. But of course you
can get watches now that are going to have dials that can play into the other crystals and color
schemes that you're looking for. Now, this is one of my favorites. This is considered tiger eye.
This is what this crystal is called. It generally has this overall brown appearance, but it will
have some streaks of gold, sometimes some reddish brown. And it is layered with just strings of
minerals that are running through and bands. And of course, because these are naturally occurring
crystals, you'll never find two that are exactly the same. They don't occur like that in nature,
even when you cut them down and get them to the exact same specifications or size or shape,
you're never going to have two that are exactly the same. So it is one, each one of these watches
is going to be one of a kind, even if they have a bunch of them made, no two will be the same. Now
there is one more stone or crystal that I wanted to talk about today, and that's going to be Onyx.
Now this is going to be a Piaget that uses Onyx as well as lapis lazuli, but know that you can get
these watches with dials or with elements on the bezel that only have Onyx. Now, typically Onyx is
going to be just flat black. I mean, about as black as you can get when it comes to stones,
but know that Onyx does actually occur in nature. It occurs in layers going from black to white.
So you can actually get a pure white Onyx dials. Most of the time, when we see Onyx dials on a
Rolex they're not going to have any hour markers, it's going to be very similar to this lapis lazuli
dial, where you may have like a date window. You may see the the Rolex Coronet up at 12 o'clock,
but it's not going to have a whole lot more. The whole idea is to make it more minimalistic
and bring more beauty to the actual stone itself. So give us some feedback. If you've got some other
crystals that come on watches. If you see some come through and you want to learn more about
them, just send us an email, give us a comment. We'd be more than happy to bring you some more
information and as always reach out to us, if you want to get one of these added to your collection.