STYLE AND SUBSTANCE

The Peak and Rolex put the spotlight on the exclusive high-tech ceramic, Cerachrom.

When it comes to high-tech ceramic, Rolex's material innovations are anything but ordinary. Ceramic first showed up in watches in the mid-1980s, but Rolex took its time to perfect the manufacturing process before debuting its first watch with a ceramic insert in 2005: the Oyster Perpetual GMT-Master II in 18 ct yellow gold, with a bidirectional rotatable bezel and a 24-hour graduated insert in black ceramic. Not only is the insert virtually scratch-proof, it is also unaffected by the sun's ultraviolet rays so its vibrant hue never fades. When the ceramic insert reappeared two years later in blue, in the Oyster Perpetual Yacht- Master II, Rolex officially named its ceramic "Cerachrom" and registered the trademark. With its physical resilience established, the next challenge was to tackle ceramic colours. Eager to keep pushing the envelope, Rolex developed the world's first two-colour combination on a single-piece ceramic component, which it presented in the 2013 Oyster Perpetual GMT-Master II. The bezel is blue on one half and black on the other, and the point at which the two shades meet is remarkably seamless. This wizardry proved no mean feat. The research and development team had to figure out a way to colour the ceramic in specific areas without altering the material's intrinsic properties. To fully appreciate the solution, let us first illustrate how the ceramic is made. Binding agents are added to a powdered ceramic mixture, which is then heated and injected into moulds that would give the piece its shape, numerals and inscriptions. It gets heated again to remove the binding agents, then fired at temperatures that can go up to 1,600 deg C (a process known as sintering) to harden and shrink the piece and give it its final colour. So the magic actually happens right after the debinding process, when the

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