The Prestige HMS was the second watch produced by Romain Gauthier and his eponymous brand. It followed the original Prestige HM and was released in 2010, helping further establish the then-nascent firm’s capabilities before going on to more technically challenging releases such as the Logical One and the Insight Micro-Rotor. Previously rendered in precious metals like red gold, yellow gold, and platinum, Romain Gauthier announced today that the Prestige HMS would serve as the setting for his first series watch in stainless steel.
The Romain Gauthier Prestige HMS in stainless steel with a meteorite dial.
The fact that Gauthier is releasing his first series-produced watch in stainless steel would be news in itself, but the watch has been further enhanced courtesy of its dial, which is constructed of a rare piece of meteorite originally discovered in 1931 and sourced from the Henbury crater field in the Northern Territory of Australia. The chosen meteorite used in the dial construction is an octahedrite ? the most common form of iron meteorites ? that has been subjected to a nitric acid treatment that reveals crisscrossing lines of nickel-iron crystal. This pattern is known as Widmanstätten, or Thomson structures, and is formed during an extended period of cooling from the parent asteroid. The example used by Romain Gauthier is particularly noteworthy for the coarseness of its nickel-iron crystal bands, also known as lamellae, that adds a sort of glisten to the dial...