Glashütte Original Puts Murano Aventurine Dials Into Two New Senators

While aventurine stone does exist, and it is beautiful, in the vast, vast majority of watches that say they have aventurine dials, they don't use stone dials. Instead, the aventurine they mention is glass. Venetian glassmakers in Murano worked out how to incorporate copper crystals inside molten glass in the 1600s, and the material has been all over dials these past few years, usually in blue and offer a beautiful look for not a lot of money. Glashütte Original, however, has a different approach to aventurine dials, with two Senators, one blue in platinum and one green in red gold.

Both cases, made in either platinum or red gold, are 40mm wide and 10.2mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 47.09mm. The lugs are a bit long for what could be a dress watch, but the thin profile and the mix of polished bezel and brushed flanks keep it from looking too big. The top crystal is a domed sapphire, there’s a sapphire display back, and water resistance is 50 meters. The fluted crown has the double-G logo.

Each aventurine disc is very thin, and Glashütte Original coats the back of it in black lacquer before mounting. That stops light coming through from behind, so the copper flecks have a black background and the dial has a deep appearance instead of milky. The blue version gets white gold hands, and the green is a dark forest shade with yellow gold hands.

Inside is the in-house automatic calibre 36-16, beating at 4Hz with 100 hours of reserve. A silicon hairspring makes it less sensitive to magnetism and temperature. Through the back you see the three-quarter plate with Glashütte striping, a hand-engraved balance cock, swan-neck fine adjustment, and a skeletonized rotor with a 21K gold weight. The blue model comes on Louisiana alligator in dark blue, the green on brown alligator nubuck, both 20mm with a pin buckle in the case metal.

The Senator Aventurine Art Déco Blue in platinum (ref. 1-36-16-40-03-01) is priced at €37,500, while the Art Nouveau Green in red gold (ref. 1-36-16-41-05-01) is priced at €35,500. See more on the Glashütte Original website.