Galaxy Class: The New MING 37.08 Starlight

One of the most popular alternative dial materials today is aventurine, whose popularity has “soared” in recent years, per the New York Times’ excellent overview of the history of the material. Aventurine is instantly recognizable: almost invariably, a deep blue field of translucent but nearly opaque, color-saturated material with a gem-like depth, in which are interspersed tiny flecks of reflective material; you can’t look at it without immediately thinking of a field of stars, although not every watchmaker that uses the stuff is deliberately attempting to evoke a starry night.

It is sufficiently prestigious and well thought of to have made an appearance in a number of very popular luxury timepieces, from Lange & Söhne to Philippe Dufour (which, presumably, seals the deal on regarding aventurine as a luxury material). The latest new watch from MING is the 37.08 Starlight, which combines the 37xx series case first introduced in the 2022 37.05 Moonphase. When the 37.05 Moonphase launched, MING described the case design as, ” … a highly refined case design that has complex compound curves – such as the line from case side to lug tip – and multiple finishes. We have also increased the visual presence of the case with a significantly larger dial opening than the 17-series and domed front and rear crystals. However, wearability and comfort for a wide variety of wrist sizes is maintained with the same 38mm maximum diameter and 20mm lug width. In short: it looks bigger than a 17-series, but feels the same on the wrist.”

The 37.08 Starlight is the second in a series of 37xx watches with what MING calls “elemental” themes; the first was the 37.08 Sand, introduced last year in Dubai. Given the spectacular clarity of the night sky in the desert (spectacular enough that one of the world’s most important telescopes is in the high Atacama desert, in Chile) Starlight seems an apt follow up to Sand.

Aventurine is actually two materials, related more in name and appearance than in actual chemistry. Aventurine is the name of a glass, which was supposedly invented in Murano, a famous Venetian center for glassmaking (Murano is a group of islands in the Venetian lagoon; it became the center of Venetian glassmaking at the end of the 13th century). The Venetian Motti family was granted a license to make the glass by the Doge in the seventeenth century, but there is evidence that aventurine-type glass was invented earlier and elsewhere (there is a Persian amulet in the collection of the University of Pennsylvania made of aventurine, also called goldstone, from the twelfth or thirteenth century).

The Times notes, “The story goes that a Venetian artisan mistakenly mixed copper shavings into molten glass, producing what a German diplomat described in a 1614 letter as “a sort of stone with golden stars inside.” The discovery was, at least so tradition says, a happy accident – and the name “aventurine” is from the Italian “avventura” – which means, adventure, or chance.

Aventurine is also the name of a naturally occurring mineral and in a reverse of what you might expect, the mineral is named after the glass, not the other way around. Aventurine, the mineral, is a type of quartzite – metamorphosed quartz – with mineral inclusions that glitter in the translucent body of the stone, like the copper flakes in aventurine glass; the mineral has been used for ornaments for thousands of years. Both materials are used today for watch dials and each presents its own advantages and challenges – what they do have in common is that, like many semiprecious dial materials, they are fragile and difficult to work with. Both can be temperamental and unpredictable materials; with the mineral, one of the biggest challenges of making watches in series is simply consistency in saturation, transparency, color, and the size and distribution of the inclusions that give mineral aventurine its glitter.

For the 37.08 Starlight, MING has announced it will be using aventurine quartzite – the mineral rather than the glass.

The inversion effects characteristic of MING watches, in which a translucent or transparent material can seem opaque or almost completely transparent depending on the angle of the light, is of course present; normally, to enhance the effect, MING uses synthetic sapphire for its dials but in this case given the nature of the dial material and its high polish, the aventurine can stand on its own. The watch also makes use of HyCeram (ceramic impregnated with Super-LumiNova) for the indexes applied to the underside of the sapphire dial.

One of many subtle and interesting design features, is the distribution of lume on the hour and minute hands. The two hands are not exactly the same length, but they’re close. The lume fills the hour hand, but not all the way to the physical tip of the hand, and forms a glowing outline around the minute hand, which echoes the open marker at 12:00.

The movement is the hand-wound MING SW210.M1 (Sellita base) with anthracite plates and bridges, semi-openworked. The design of the movement is obviously a considerable upgrade to the base Sellita caliber – the aesthetics as usual for MING have been carefully thought through to both harmonize and contrast with the design of the rest of the watch – at the same time, you also get reliability, and replacement parts are a non-issue. The case is 38mm x 10.9mm, and water resistance is 100M.

MING says that while the design team considered several strap and bracelet options, they eventually decided to offer the watch on the MING second-gen Universal Bracelet, which is a very supple, but very solidly built five-links-across design. The bracelet is extremely well made – I’ve had a chance to wear one on a personal watch for about a year and a half and it’s incredibly comfortable – and the finish is very good; so much so that it takes nothing at all away from the overall elegance of the watch.

It’s a dramatically beautiful but very elegant watch – relatively restrained, the design lets every element really have its moment in the sun, or I suppose, under the stars. There will be 300 total, and price is CHF 4,500, with deliveries expected in August of this year.

The MING 37.08 Starlight: case, 38mm x 109mm, 44.5mm lug to lug; 20mm lug width; 316L stainless steel with domed sapphire crystals front and back (note the rear crystal is domed as well). HyCeram indexes; SLN X1coated hands in light gold, 100M water resistant. Dial in Aventurine stone. Movement, Sellita for MING SW210.M1, anthracite skeletonized bridges with contrasting rhodium circular brushing; hand wound with 40 hour power reserve. Bracelet, 20mm 2nd-gen MING Universal. Made in Switzerland. Price, CHF 4,500, available July/August of 2024; 300 piece limited edition. For more info and to reserve a watch, visit Ming.watch.