BY HARLAN CHAPMAN-GREEN
At Watches & Wonders 2023, TAG Heuer unveiled some special watches which made use of lab-grown diamonds. These are a rarity in high-end watches as the buyers generally care as much about the provenance of the diamonds as they do about the watch they’re mounted to. Lab-made diamonds are often seen as inferior because they were made fairly easily in a laboratory rather than being forged by nature over billions of years and then mined out of the ground, despite being the same at an atomic leval. A lot of a product’s value is placed on the work that went into it, naturally, which is one of the reasons why luxury watches cost so much more than the average watches you can pick up from a supermarket. But, I digress.
For LVMH Watch Week 2024, which is on right now, TAG Heuer unveils the new Carrera Date Plasma Diamant d’Avant Garde. One of TAG Heuer’s aims with its lab-grown diamond project is to perfect the art of making coloured diamonds, and it’s evidently done just that with this new piece. The TAG Heuer logo and the crown have been made out of yellow diamonds; in the natural world, coloured diamonds are much rarer.
Meanwhile, the rest of the applied hour markers on the dial are white diamonds. The dial itself is also made of diamonds and is designed to shimmer. The dial is easily the standout feature of this piece.
Around the back of the watch and on display is the self-winding Calibre 7, which is based on a Sellita calibre. It has a 4Hz beat rate and a 46-hour power reserve. It’s all wrapped up inside a 36mm 18k white gold case with a white alligator leather strap and a white gold buckle.
The water resistance of this model is 50m. Currently, we don’t have any pricing information available, but you can expect it to be quite expensive.
