With this unprecedented marriage of diamond and black ceramic, the brand illustrates its determination to develop its offerings for women who are as much fascinated by technicity as by beauty. The RM 07-01 in gem-set black ceramic will be on view for a sneak peek at the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie in Geneva, next January.
“After our work on setting gems in Carbon TPT®, we wanted to extend this innovative setting technique to new materials”, explains Cécile Guenat, Technical Director for Jewellery-making at Richard Mille. “We naturally gravitated to ceramic, because it had never been done before. There is now no subterfuge in the way diamonds are incorporated, thanks to way the mitraillage is performed by machining the material directly.”
In addition to its exceptional hardness and scratch resistance, black TZP ceramic possesses an extremely fine grain, ensuring a perfect finish with a matte effect. The latter is the outcome of a long and delicate process of milling and micro-shot peening, whereas showcasing the complex shapes of the bezel and case bottom requires the intervention of a finisher, who polishes each angle by hand.
RM 07-01 in gem-set black ceramic © Richard Mille
Separately produced, and carefully polished, red gold prongs are embedded in the many settings, each 0.25 millimetre in diameter, receiving and holding fast the full-cut diamonds of exceptional clarity. Thus do the velvety black of the ceramic and the sparkle of diamonds set each other off spectacularly. The same is also true for the 5N red gold dial, set with black onyx and diamonds.
This noted, I can still enjoy it for what I mentioned above: to find this type of detail in this quantity, you either go for a near six-figure watch or you will miss out. Having seen numerous manufactures and handled so many costly watches, it’s mind-numbingly complex and difficult-to-make details like this that are what actually make a watch stick out from the rest. And if there is anything that I do enjoy in a Richard Mille view, it’s you could sort of get lost in it and expect to discover such details even weeks after sporting the watch.And I’m sorry, but a conventional watch with a conventional exterior must possess one totally amazing movement to warrant a similar six-figure price — and again, lots of collectors who today are buying (and sporting) Richard Milles do so since a new dial onto a 5270 often just is not exciting enough when on other watches everywhere you look, you see detailing which won’t ever be current on proudly conventional watches. Before you light your torches and pull out your pitchforks, I’m not saying one is superior to the other, or one should not exist and the other should, but rather that beyond the show-off element, there is another reason why Richard Mille watches (and other people, like an MB&F Legacy Machine Perpetual or Urwerk UR-110, et cetera) do so well at a period while others struggle.What leaves room for criticism concerning the situation itself is the fact that 18k white gold scratches if you look at it the wrong way — things tougher than white gold include melting icehockey, or even the Queen’s royal selection of feather cushions. The ceramic alternative won’t be that much better, but will surely offer an improvement in this regard, at a price of lost sheen that only valuable metals can produce. Water resistance, despite the double-O ring crown is rated for 30m. I keep saying all contemporary watches should have at least 100m depth rating, though the way things are going, 30-50m seems to become the standard among non-dive watches.
The timpeiece houses the in-house Calibre CRMA2, an automatic movement assembled on a baseplate and bridges crafted in grade 5 titanium. Its variable-geometry rotor in 18-carat 5N red gold makes it possible to adjust the automatic winding to the activity levels of its wearer.