PRECIOUS TIME

With steel watches still streaking, collectors may want to shift their attention to more personal propositions. Nothing is more personal than a yen for precious metals.

- Ashok Soman

There is something about precious metals that speaks to me. Of course, the world of precious metals is much wider than watches, and wearing objects in these materials is something many of us have in common. I have the unhappy condition of not being able to wear reactive metals so my go-to has always been gold...which was my gateway to appreciating the virtues of platinum.

You have most likely encountered platinum in the form of rings, and perhaps more than a few of you have platinum wedding bands. If you made this particular decision and you likely did it over white gold then you have probably found all sorts of reasons to love platinum. Indeed, you may not even need reasons.

Sometimes the facts alone will not do, and a discussion of precious metals in watchmaking is also one of those times. The reason is simple enough, yet I will begin counterintuitively. Consider for the moment something we all know that some watches in steel are valued as highly as, or even higher than models in gold. I trust I need not point out the specific examples as every year since 2016 has seen these examples trotted out far too often. One consequence of this has been the reinforced perception that steel is a precious metal, or as good as one anyway. On that note, Joshua Munchow's Here's Why article for QP early last year on this subject inspired this riposte of sorts, but I digress.

GOING FOR GOLD

Looking only to gold then, one fact says it all. The retail price of any given model in gold does not have much of a relationship with material costs. There are many examples to get into but one can simply count on the value of gold being just 20% of the price, and that is if we are being so generous as to count 18k gold as 24k gold, and if we use the cost price of the watch, not the recommended retail price. Apply this line of reasoning and you will find yourself in trouble.