Sands of time: what watch should you wear for a drive in the desert?

If you need a vehicle to hit the desert and look good doing so, you can’t go wrong with a Mercedes-AMG G63 6x6. Prices have already nudged past the million dollar mark, so there is that to think about. But what watch would you take?

Nothing says you love dunes more than a watch with actual sand in it. The Ressence Type 9 is a very unusual watch to begin with. Instead of the standard arrangement of hands going around a face, it tells the time via two rotating discs, with the subdial moving hypnotically clockwise around the main dial.

It was made for a UAE-based retailer, and has a dial covered in real sand, with a little bit taken from each of the seven emirates. The sand is glued to the rotating titanium discs and the dial of each watch varies slightly according to the spread of coloured grains.

The sandy dial is matched to a brown strap – camel leather, of course – but with a case rated ‘splash resistant’ it is probably the least durable of the watches this month. None of this matters, of course, in a game of fantasy desert watch. Nor does the fact that there are only 20 available. By the time you read this, they will probably have been snapped up.

Pro tip 

All watches come with a water resistance rating, but sadly no such equivalents for sand proofing. Grains of sand are a lot bigger than water molecules, so a dive-rated watch is theoretically OK with a bit of sand. But it can still cause problems – wearing down the glass, jamming pushers, bezels etc. If in doubt, you can always drive through the desert with the windows up.