18 ct Armor Gold® is a new type of gold that is significantly harder and more wear-resistant as conventional 5N gold.

Gold is timeless and retains its value. It embodies luxury and elegance more than any other precious metal. The pure gold content of an IWC watch case is 75 per cent, which is equivalent to 18 carats. The gold is alloyed with other materials and in this way assumes the desired colour. 18 ct Armor Gold® is an unusual new variant of 5N gold. The material is produced using a sophisticated process, during which the microstructure of the alloy is transformed. As a result, the material is significantly harder and more wear-resistant as conventional 5N gold. 18 ct Armor Gold® features for the first time in the Big Pilot’s Watch Constant Force Tourbillon Edition “Le Petit Prince” (Ref. 590303). The new material is ideally suited for the bulky case and the striking diamond crown on the Big Pilot’s Watch.

Technical ceramics of the kind used in watches are based on polycrystalline powders such as silicates, aluminium oxide or silicon carbide. They are mixed with various additives to form a homogeneous mass, shaped and sintered at very high temperatures in an oven. During the sintering process, the additives vaporize to leave extremely stable ceramic bodies. The manufacture of a watch case, however, is very demanding because the ceramic shrinks by around a third during the baking process. This shrinkage has to be factored in as early as the design phase to ensure that the movement later fits snugly inside the case and satisfies the narrow tolerances. IWC presented the world’s first ceramic watch, the Da Vinci Perpetual Calendar (Ref. 3755), in 1986. Since then, the company has launched watch cases made of black boron carbide high-performance ceramic or brown silicon nitride ceramic. The latest example of innovative ceramics from Schaffhausen is the sand-coloured ceramic case of the Pilot’s Watch Chronograph Top Gun Edition “Mojave Desert” (Ref. 389103).

Platinum is the rarest, purest and most precious of all the metals used in the production of jewellery. It is imperishable and has a singular, whitish sheen.

Platinum has lain inert in the depths of the earth for billions of years. But it is only in the past few hundred years that we have been able to extract and process the shiny grey-white metal. Platinum is extremely scarce and precious. Around ten metric tons of ore need to be mined to produce a single ounce of the metal. It then takes more than one hundred separate stages to separate the platinum from the ore. This process may take up to several months. Because of its unusually high purity, platinum is heavier than either silver or gold. IWC uses platinum for the Portugieser Perpetual Calendar (Ref. IW503406), for instance. This imperishable precious metal imbues any wristwatch with a unique character of its own.