Get the glow: the best luminescent watches

It’s not often that a watch is sold on how it looks in the dark – but that’s the premise behind Bell & Ross’s new BR-X3, dubbed the Night Vision. Why so? Because the model is made using an exotic composite called Lum-Camo, a blend of carbon fibre and luminous resin. Consequently, at night time it’s not just the usual hands and indices that glow – as functionality might dictate – but elements of the entire case, in this instance with a marbling effect.

'We want the watch to be as readable as possible day or night, of course, but the point here is [this use of luminescent material] means that the watch looks totally different at night from during the day,' explains Carlos Rosillo, CEO of Bell & Ross, which has a track record in experimenting with luminescent effects, notably with its BR-X5 Green Lum, with a fully luminous case. 'There’s a wow effect. I don’t see why [watch design] tends to ignore this second, night-time life for a watch.'

The template for doing as much has, after all, long been there: one enduring appeal of quartz digital watches has been their ability to light up, Rosillo notes. But that idea is, slowly, spreading into the mechanical watch world too – and now not just for practicality’s sake but as a means of artistic expression.

Earlier this year, for example, Finnish watchmaker Stephan Sarpaneva released a limited-edition Moomin 80 watch – to mark the 80th anniversary of Tove Jansson’s Moomins characters – with dials fully illustrated in ‘lume’ (one edition in colour, another in black and white). And independent brand Arcanaut – whose ‘chief materials officer’ is James Thompson, a pioneer of artistic lume with his own Black Badger jewellery line – launched its Experimental ARC II line of watches with fully lumed, resin-injected aluminium foam dials.

Meanwhile, Kollokium’s sold-out Projekt 01 Variant F has a dial covered with 488 cylindrical pins – made from a proprietary Lichtblock material, a ceramic resin infused with violet-emission Super-Luminova (the industry standard luminescent material) – organised in a way to make hour markers. To get the desired effect, it used some 350 to 500 times the amount of lume that might be used on a more traditional dial.

'It was a very complex process to get the effect we wanted – and developing our own recipe was far more complicated than we expected, which may be one reason why the broader industry’s use of lume creatively has been rather restrained so far,' says Kollokium’s co-founder Amr Sindi. 'A lot of that creativity has come from smaller brands too, which arguably have smaller risks in exploring lume artistically, beyond the needs of time legibility.'

There are exceptions to this: in 2024, IWC unveiled Ceralume, a patent-pending luminescent ceramic material subsequently used to make a fully glow-in-the-dark case for a concept pilot’s watch. But, according to Giles Ellis, founder of the independent Schofield Watch Company – which was making creative use of luminescence back in 2013, with the Blacklamp model’s Tritium gas light – for many of the establishment watch names, there remains the challenge ‘of reconciling the idea of being a serious watch brand and the feeling that using luminescence artistically is some kind of gimmick, that’s it’s only something cheaper brands might do'.

'But surely there’s scope for lume to be fun and cool, for it to be used in alternative and not just practical ways,' adds Ellis, whose 2024 Obscura model uses a range of blue, red and green lumes to make for model that is, as he puts it, 'austere by day and “party!” by night'.

That Malaysian brand Ming, a regular experimenter with lume, in 2024 won the prestigious Grand Prix D’Horlogerie de Geneve Sports Watch award for its (currently sold-out) Bluefin – with its engraved, lume-filled secondary glass – perhaps points to growing interest in the expressive potential in lume. But Maximilian Büsser, founder of MB&F, is less sure of a wider take-up by the watch industry.

'There’s a balance to strike between elegance and the use of lume even just for readability, such that many watch designers opt for elegance and the resulting [night-time] readability is just OK,' he says. 'And while the industry is still [embracing the] trend for vintage and heritage-inspired watches, it’s hard to see lume being used creatively outside of the smaller, more design-led brands.'