Tiffany’s new watch took 100 hours to make one dial

Tiffany & Co.’s new Eternity Enamel Clematis watch is based on a real Tiffany Studios lamp from around 1906. The creation is inspired by a hanging shade designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany, son of the brand’s founder, who ran Tiffany & Co.’s design studio in the early 1900s. The lamp’s clematis flower pattern has been shrunk down and turned into a watch dial using plique-à-jour enamel, a technique dating back to 6th-century Byzantium that suspends coloured glass-like enamel in a metal frame with no backing, so light passes straight through it.

Six enamel flowers sit over a bed of 432 snow-set diamonds, with darker floral shapes scattered around them using a different enamelling technique called champlevé, which needs its own separate hollowed-out gold pieces. Altogether, assembling one dial takes more than 100 hours, with 30 of those hours just for setting the diamonds and 55 for the enamel work.

Around the edge of the watch face sits a ring of 36 aquamarines, each cut into a small rectangle. The sides of the case are covered edge to edge in diamonds set so tightly together that no metal shows between them. Inside, the watch winds itself using the natural movement of your wrist, so there’s no battery and no manual winding required.