Watches

World production of osmium runs to around one tonne a year, against more than three thousand tonnes of gold. That scarcity is not a marketing position, it is a fact. It is also the only element with a natural blueish lustre in solid form. The colour is the metal itself, not a tint or a plating. Osmium is additionally the densest element that occurs in nature. The dial colour and weight are the first thing most people notice when they see and pick up an osmium watch.

The property that makes it difficult is the melting point — above 3,000 °C, which makes casting no good way to process it. That also made the development of the dial challenging. More about osmium as a metal.

Because osmium cannot be melted and poured easily, the block is sintered instead: The powder is pressed under extreme pressure at high temperature in an oxygen-free environment until it forms a dense, pore-free solid. That work happens at MetaMetals in Austria together with our partner. Pressing the powder straight into disc shape — the obvious shortcut — was tried during development and abandoned, because the discs had no structural stability. Dial blanks of roughly 0.7 millimetres are then wire-cut from the block.

The finishing is the part that nearly ended the project. One commercial dial finisher's standard abrasives could not make a single mark on the surface; a second offered to try only if €20,000 was paid up front to build an airtight chamber, with no guarantee. Maximilian took over the grinding himself. And it was an enormous challenge to grind a 0.7 millimetres osmium disk. Osmium is brittle as well as extraordinarily hard. Four dials broke during grinding and two more during assembly. Despite all these setbacks he succeeded and now does the sunburst grind himself instead, guiding the tool by hand across every dial — which is why no two are quite identical. The full account is on his partner page.

"You hold this little machine in your fingers and glide it over the dial while the dial turns on the table. You don't do it in one go — you work for a minute or two, then take a short break and make a few adjustments. But the dial is ready when it looks ready. You can't feel it. You have to see it."

Maximilian James, MJ Watches, August 2026

"The way I grind them is quite a rough grind, so you really see the texture of the metal. Because it's done by hand it isn't perfectly machined, and that gives it a certain vibrancy — the streaks aren't perfect, so it has a certain life to it. And it will always shimmer, whether there's a lot of light or very little."

Maximilian James, MJ Watches, August 2026

Ruthenium is a platinum-group metal nearly as rare as osmium, and it behaves quite differently on a dial: a cool, velvety anthracite that absorbs light rather than reflecting it. The result is unusually high contrast against pale hands and indices — a more legible watch than the osmium version, if that matters to you.

Tantalum is a refractory metal that is rarer than gold in the universe, with a distinctive dark grey to slightly purple cast that has made it increasingly popular in wedding bands and luxury watch cases. Unlike osmium it is rolled rather than sintered, so the production route is different.

Both are made to order. Unalloyed gold, silver and copper dials are available too, certified the same way — configure any of the six on the product page.

Every watch arrives with two certificates: one signed by Maximilian James for the watch itself, and a digitally signed PDF certificate of authenticity from MetaMetals documenting the dial metal, its minimum purity, minimum weight and serial number.

That pairing matters more than it might sound. The dial holds most of the watch's material value, so being able to demonstrate what the metal is and where it came from is what makes a private resale straightforward years later.