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No. Superluminova / Luminova won't age as does tritium etc - hence the faux tints produced to emulate a vintage.
Looking at vintage watches with their patina, how do you think modern watches will look in 10, 20 years etc.
With a lot of ceramic dial dials around now I’d expect these to remain fairly unspoilt in terms of patina. But for other materials, would they age as they have in the past?
What about something like a new moon watch from today as an example. Would you expect that to develop a cream patina or are there new materials used that would keep it looking as it is now?
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No. Superluminova / Luminova won't age as does tritium etc - hence the faux tints produced to emulate a vintage.
I see no attraction in patina, to me patina is another word for deterioration. So I can see the attraction of modern watches that will look the same one hundred years from now.
The problem with vintage is that we are now being blackmailed into letting them deteriorate into looking a bloody mess. My local AD spent 15 minutes talking me out of having my 1655 Explorer11 spruced up. I know he has done me a favour in keeping the watch valuable but it looks more knackered than what I do. Sorry but that is just not sensible.
I agree wholeheartedly, patina to me is a way of making decay / decrepitude sound like positive attributes, wabi too.Originally Posted by Mick P
Will they age? Not the lume, certainly not dramatically, ceramic, I just don’t know.
I think design choices may age very badly, particularly the current vogue for faux vintage, but that is an answer to a different question
Dave
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Interesting question. DLC, ceramic and carbon fibre cases look great when new but really need to be babied to keep their looks. You’re always only one knock away from a scratch or chip that can’t be simply polished out. Having said that, watches made of these materials tend to be the watches that are following the trend of the day in terms of looks and size so will probably be consigned to the bin long before they can be considered vintage.
Looking ahead ten or twenty years the vintage market will probably look much the same as it does today. I can’t see many of the watches that are on trend now still being popular and I can’t even see today’s Rolex ceramics carrying the sort of premium that vintage ones do today because they’re made in such high numbers.
There's a fine line between patina and damage.
The way lume on a Speedmaster from even 20 years ago discolours does have a certain appeal over the garish white or, far worse, baby poo shade of fauxtina lume.
But I see watches that are scratched to hell, water damaged dials and totally faded bezels fawned over and think 'Emperors new clothes'.
Still, each to their own.
M
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Breitling Cosmonaute 809 - What's not to like?
My quartz SMP hands and dial look exactly as they did in 1998 .. I'm pretty sure the same is true of my 1986 white dial quartz Seiko. In most cases I think it will take longer than 20 years for patina to develop.
My 1960 Omega Seamaster has been restored to within an inch of its life and looks pretty much as good as new. I would much rather wear a watch that looks fabulous than tatty.
Horses for courses of course. Why drive a beautiful restored E-type when you can drive a heap of sh1te?
To me, the main question is will people retain an interest in mechanical watches through the coming decades? If they don’t , old watches will probably die of neglect. How can we know?
I fully expect archaeologists in the distant future to discover and dig up my still-functioning and immaculate GShock...
There's an initial appeal to clean and new, and there's an appeal to ageing gracefully, which is quite different to looking dented, worn out and water damaged, which has very little appeal and needs fixing.
Personally I find that brand new watches look a little too new and shiny, and they seem to improve over the course of a few years. Not due to picking up any noticeable scratches, but perhaps a very fine layer of wear takes the edge off them and gives them a glow. They look like they belong to the owner instead of the shop, and become a bit less loud and dare I say it, nouveau riche! Clearly today's watches should age well if well maintained, if anything they might start to look a bit better due to this wearing in process. But they'll go the same way as vintage watches if they're treated carelessly and scratched to pieces, left unserviced and taken for a swim with degraded seals.
A more interesting question for me is how they will look in a decade or two in design terms. 60s watches seem timeless, though that's perhaps an illusion based on how they appear to us in this decade, when mid-century design is popular. 70s can also look cool, or completely out there. 80s is often pretty ugly to today's eyes, and I've notice a lot of (mostly younger) people treating the 90s as if it was the prehistoric era, to be ironically revived and chuckled at, though to me it feels like yesterday.
The early 21st Century appears to me to be progressing more slowly in design terms than the 20th Century, with less extreme changes of direction between decades, but that could yet be proved wrong - our love of vintage is perhaps obscuring seismic shifts like the emergence of smart watches. I'm very interested to see how watches like the Rolex Sub and the Royal Oak look in a decade or three. It's hard to imagine us not still appreciating some designs that have stood the test of time so far. But I suspect that only a very few current watches are destined to be vintage classics in future, it's more likely that they will appear to be 'hilariously turn of the century'. It might even appear that our current era experienced a very strange fad for oversized, showy and oddly retro jewellery, that will go hugely out of fashion.
Last edited by Itsguy; 8th October 2020 at 10:34.
I like a bit of light patina. Sadly, today's watches will no longer enjoy this over the years with modern materials.
The way the orange hands on my Speedy MkII have gone slightly paler over time and the tritium of my Seamaster 120 has gone a fetching shade of yellow as opposed to stark white only improves the look IMO.
Cheers,
Neil.
It does seem odd to me why some people even buy vintage watches, they want something 50 to 60 years old to look like it has just been lifted out of Goldsmiths window. Come on get real. Part of the attraction is that the watch has had a life, a story to tell. Sure, no one wants to wear a watch that is completely trashed, but some of the vintage watches owned on this forum are absolutely stunning and we are not just talking Rolex here, there are many brands represented.
There will be scratches and knocks and other blemishes, just look how old and tied we look at that age. A watch that has aged and taken on a different look will be unique, you may struggle to find another like it. However, get the call and pick up that brand new exclusive watch knowing that around the world there are thousands of people wearing the indentical watch, a uniform to the modern age if you will.
I don't see modern watches changing over time. They will look lived in, but you won't get patina developing over 30 years or more.
It does seem fashionable to be in one camp and knock the other, but I like both. Horses for courses indeed.
Wise words.
Cheers,
Neil.
There’s also another side of it, for me anyway.
Liking the watches of old but not the time ages looks, I prefer a fully refurbed piece.
But I do understand and respect all opinions as it’s all down to personal preference.
My father was a Toolmaker and wore his watch every working day and his Mondia watch is scratched up to high heaven. If I could restore it to look like the day he bought it back in 1942 then I would. However economic forces are effectively to walk around with bashed up watches on our wrist and it's crazy.
All materials deteriorate - and metals like brass and aluminium are still used quite widely in dials and hands - so I'd expect corrosion to continue to manifest in current watches 50 years from now. Likewise, pigments in paints and plastics still fade in sunlight and plastics and emulsions also discolour over time, especially if exposed to sunlight, so many of those will change too.
A related question that nags me - I really dislike the styling of 80s, and especially blobby-90s watches - to my eye they have aged horribly, and even some noughties stuff looks pretty bad, so I wonder how the designs of the teens and twenties that I own now will look in a decade or two?
Yeah, I was gonna say, lume won't age in the same way that tritium did, but otherwise stuff should fade, rot and corrode just as well as it did 60 years ago.
I've had a quite a few vintage Omegas and most have either been through STS or Bienne before I picked them up, or sent there after I got them, primarily because I couldn't live with someone else's dinks and scratches on the watch. What I put on there is a different matter!
It's probably each to their own here, but I recently talked myself out of a vintage Heuer Autavia because I was being asked to pay a premium for what I considered to be past neglect (a ghost bezel). In that sense vintage Heuer reminds me of vintage Rolex, with collectors dancing on increasingly smaller pin heads for subtle differences that can vastly inflate the value of the watch. I leave myself open to charges of not knowing what I'm talking about here, but I could afford it, so I was seriously in the market before common sense (from my POV) kicked in.
On the face of it the classic car analogy is a good one: would you rather drive a battered or nicely restored VW Beetle? I'd take the restored one time after time, but then VW don't offer to service your Beetle and restore it to factory specs and appearance, for a fraction of the cost of the current market value of the item, like the big watch houses do with their older offerings!
Fine if you actually drive the restored one, but if it sits in your garage because you're frightened to scratch it, what's the point (substitute safe for garage for watches).
M
Breitling Cosmonaute 809 - What's not to like?
Interesting, I much prefer heavy patina and deliberately look for watches with interesting damage/scratches. I'm definitely one of those jerks who is forcing everybody to walk around looking like a hobo for fear of destroying resale value.
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