The price of the brand

The logo tells you nothing about the crystal

If a brand's price reflected its technical quality, the most expensive brands in our panel would show the highest sapphire rates. The scatter plot below places each brand by its median price and its sapphire share.

There is no slope. Burberry sits alone at the top of the chart with 85.7% sapphire. Just below it on price, Hugo Boss (€384) drops to 1.4% and Emporio Armani (€349) to 0%. Meanwhile Festina, at 149 euros, reaches 3.1%, more than double Hugo Boss for a median price two and a half times lower.

This result does not contradict our previous study, which showed that sapphire becomes the majority above 600 euros. The two complement each other: the price of a model predicts its crystal, the average price of a brand does not. A brand positioned high can perfectly well build its whole catalogue on mineral crystal.

The full table

Sixteen brands gather at least sixty watches whose crystal is documented. The denominator used is that number of documented crystals, never the total headcount: a poorly recorded brand would otherwise appear artificially devoid of sapphire.

Sapphire remains an exception

Set against the accessible market as a whole, the debate is quickly settled: mineral crystal equips 90.7% of the watches whose crystal is documented. All variants combined, sapphire accounts for only 5.2%.

Hardlex (44 watches) deserves a mention: it is a proprietary hardened mineral crystal, midway between ordinary mineral and sapphire. It resists scratches better than standard mineral while taking impacts better than sapphire, which is harder but more brittle.

The dial, by contrast, is strongly gendered

The crystal draws no distinction between genders. The indices, those hour markers set on the dial, separate them very clearly indeed.

Indices set with stones and numerals and crystal indices are 100% women's, stones alone 95.8% and rhinestone 94.1%. More striking still, the complete absence of indices is 92.7% women's: the bare dial, with no hour marker, is an aesthetic stance almost exclusively reserved for women's watches.

At the other end, round indices (30.4% women) and Arabic numerals (36%) lean towards men. Roman numerals are the exception within the classic register: they are 71.5% women's. As for batons, by far the most widespread with 1,318 watches, they are almost at parity (44.2%): the neutral default marker.

What to take away

To choose a watch on the accessible market, the brand is a poor shortcut to technical quality. It tells you about a style, a distribution network and an after-sales service, not about the crystal that protects the dial. The only way to know is to read the specification sheet of the precise model.

Methodology

Scope: watches active and physically in stock on 5 August 2026. The crystal analysis covers the 3,275 watches whose crystal type is recorded, and only brands gathering at least 60 documented crystals appear in the table. The sapphire rate aggregates every declared variant (sapphire, scratchproof sapphire, anti-reflective sapphire).

The women's and men's shares of the indices are calculated on the watches whose gender is recorded; the two may therefore add up to less than the count shown on the row. Prices are quoted including VAT and correspond to observed rates, below recommended prices: a brand median price describes our assortment, not the brand's official positioning.

The specifications are those declared by the brands, with no workshop verification on our part. This survey describes the accessible watch market and says nothing about high horology, where sapphire is the norm.

Datasets

Published under Licence Ouverte 2.0 (Etalab), compatible with CC BY 4.0. Free to reuse, including commercially, provided you cite the source and give a link to this page.

See also the other editions of the Observatory, in particular what a watch's price actually buys, whose conclusion this study extends.