Edition 001

Gibeon iron, ~4.5 billion years old. The Widmanstätten crosshatch cannot be reproduced by any furnace; no two slices repeat.

Stone from one Afghan valley coloured Tutankhamun’s mask and Vermeer’s ultramarine. Lazurite blue, calcite veins, pyrite stars.

Copper-green, banded like tree rings. The Winter Palace dressed a whole room in it; a dial carries one ring-set, centred.

The cameo stone of Rome, cut for emperors. On a dial: one dark stratum, polished until the surface itself is the ornament.

From the quarries that faced Rome and freed the David. Limestone remade under pressure, in no hurry at all.

Named not for where it was born but for the journey it made, through Turkish hands to Europe. The founder’s signature stone.

Rome’s signet stone: hot wax releases cleanly from it, so a carved red oval became a person’s working signature.

Banded rose from a cavity three kilometres up in the Andes. Rare enough on a dial that most collectors have never held one.

Golden chatoyance, a seam of light that sweeps across the stone as the wrist turns. Science revised its story twice.

Rome marvelled at it; the electron microscope finally explained it in 1964. Colour from pure geometry, and the hardest stone in the set to cut.