The 10 Best Black Watches For Men
Special Honors
A. Lange & Sohne Lange 1 The dial on this highly unusual timepiece is made from a combination of solid silver and sapphire crystal, allowing you to see aspects of its construction that have been elegantly rendered to match its monochromatic aesthetic. Its oversized date windows — a hallmark of the company — run their numbers on a fully lumed background for maximum nighttime legibility. Its hand-painted moon phase and platinum case add to an undeniable degree of elegance, and a remarkably steep price tag. alange-soehne.com
Seiko 5 Street SRPD79 Part of a massive relaunch of a popular line, this blackout model offers an in-house automatic movement and luminescent material on its hands and hour markings. Its bezel turns with a satisfying click, and at 42.5mm in thickness, it's a good fit for most wrists. As a successor to the company's SKX pieces, however, it has gone down to 100 meters of water resistance, so it's not a true diver. seikowatches.com
Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Perpetual This extremely complicated offering from one of the titan's of Swiss watchmaking is made from black ceramic and hand-finished to the same high degree they apply to their precious metals. It features a quartet of subdials to relay the data from its calendar, and the designers have done away with the hour markings at 12, three, six, and nine to help declutter the dial and increase legibility. For many, it's prohibitively expensive, but for others, it should become a family heirloom. audemarspiguet.com
Editor's Notes
April 06, 2020:
What qualifies a watch as being black, anyway? Is a black dial enough, or should the monochrome color extend to the markings, hands, chapter ring, bezel, and even the case and strap? For the purposes of our ranking, we tried to find models that were as black as possible without sacrificing too much on legibility. The Omega Speedmaster "Dark Side Of The Moon" pushes this requirement a little bit by really leaning into its black everything, but the time is still surprisingly discernible on the wrist. And if a model was available with a black case, we went for it, which is why we upgraded the Timex model in our last iteration for the Timex MK1, which offers a black aluminum case.
Aluminum is something of an outlier here, however, as the majority of black cases are made from either PVD-coated steel or ceramics (and occasionally titanium). Now, these aren't the ceramics you're thinking of from pottery class; they're highly robust zirconium dioxide materials that are virtually scratch-proof, but that can crack if dropped from enough height, so they still warrant more care than pure steel. But to be clear, I prefer these to PVD-coated steel like what you see on the Nixon Corporal SS and the Hamilton Khaki Field Automatic Chronograph, as PVD coatings are like gold platings in that they can scratch easily and wear away over time, leaving the user with a mess of a watch. That said, much like gold plating, if a PVD coating is thick enough, and applied well enough, you might not run into that many problems. And I'll bet my lunch for the year that Hamilton's PVD is work the investment.