Can You Judge a Watch by its Face?

When we drop a look at a watch, its dial, often called a 'face', is the first thing that catches our glance. Watch designers do their best to make faces of their timepieces distinguish among a great variety of watches available today. What are the major design features of a watch's face to pay your attention to?

Hour markers: These are often represented by Roman or Arabic numerals. However, instead of numerals you will also see short lines (known as indices or indixes), dots or even precious (or fake) stones. Some watches feature 12 hour markers, others - four. There are such timepieces that lack hour markers at all.

Watch Hands: Watch hands are featured in a wide range of variations. Among the most common ones you will come across the following:

• 'lozenge' in a shape of an elongated diamond;
• feuille, with pointed ends and thick at the central part;
• baton, resembling a pencil, with the same width at all the length;
• Breguet, with a tiny hollow circle at the tip;
• dauphine, resembling an elongated triangle, really thick at one end and turning into a point at the other.

As for sports watch models, their hands are often provided with luminous coating to offer greater readability.

Sub-dials: Sub-dials add to a watch's face a trendy look, and improve the watch's functionality in general. Modern designers like to create sub-dials in colors and materials different from the main dial. Sub-dials are added to the dial for different reasons - they often display the chronograph function, 24-hours, date, phases of the moon, etc.

Power reserve indicators: Some mechanical watches feature special indicators on the dial that keep aware a watch's owner about how much power is left in the movement. You will often see a fan-shaped sub-dial with a hand moving along the scale beginning with a full power to zero. Indications are as a rule featured in hours or days.

Retrograde indicators: Present-day mechanical timepieces often provide retrograde hands as an alternative to conventional hands placed in the dial's center. Retrograde hands travel across an arc on the dial. As soon as they reach the end of the arc, they 'jump' back to the starting position and then again move across the arc. Wristwatches inherited this feature from pocket watches, only now we enjoy the retrograde indicators in updated version.

Calendar windows: The latest fashion trends suggest large date windows, also called in French - grands guichets. They are often noticed on both quartz and mechanical timepieces.

Dial treatment: This feature will be found really important by those who appreciate not only the timepiece's functionality but also its aesthetic beauty. Faces of some watches are embellished with decorative patterns called guilloche in French. The dial is engraved with an intricate pattern, featuring sun-rays, wavy lines or scallops.

You will also come across watches with 'silvered' dials. Their dials are covered by a thin silver layer to provide them with metallic brightness.

Mother-of-pearl dials are extremely popular nowadays, and especially among women. They offer a luminous, satiny look.

If you have looked through the listed above features of a watch's face, while choosing the right timepiece, you will be perfectly informed what details to pay your attention to.