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Audemars Piguet puts a decade with Serena Williams into white ceramic

The Royal Oak Selfwinding Chronograph "Serena Williams" is a 38mm limited edition in white ceramic with a pink mother-of-pearl dial.

Hen & Mills Editorial · 4 min read · 19 September 2026

• Audemars Piguet has turned its long-running association with Serena Williams into a limited-edition 38mm Royal Oak Selfwinding Chronograph in white ceramic.
• The case, integrated bracelet, crown and push-pieces are all white ceramic, over a pink-tinted mother-of-pearl dial and a titanium case back.
• Calibre 6401 drives it, and the brand has published neither a price nor an edition size, with Australian availability not yet detailed.

Most athlete collaborations in this business amount to a signature on a case back and a colourway borrowed from a kit supplier, which is why the good ones are worth stopping for. Audemars Piguet and Serena Williams have been working together for more than a decade without producing a watch with her name on it, long enough that a good number of us had quietly assumed they never would. They have now, and the thing they have made is the Royal Oak Selfwinding Chronograph "Serena Williams", reference 26450CB.OO.1356CB.02.

White ceramic, all the way through

The case and the integrated bracelet are both white ceramic, and so are the crown and the push-pieces, which is the detail that turns this from a ceramic watch into a ceramic object. Ceramic push-pieces are rare because they are miserable to make and easy to chip in the machining, and skipping them for steel is the shortcut nobody would have noticed. Audemars Piguet has not taken it. The case back is titanium and its frame is engraved with the words Limited Edition, and the whole thing runs to 38mm across and 11.1mm tall.

White ceramic behaves unlike steel on the wrist in a way that is hard to convey until you have held some. It is colder to the touch for the first few seconds, then it warms and stays warm, and it does not develop the fine web of hairlines that a brushed steel Royal Oak picks up within a month. What it will do, if you catch a corner on a door frame hard enough, is chip rather than dent. That is the trade, and it is a real one.

A dial that could have been a marketing colour and is not

The dial is pink-tinted mother-of-pearl, with tone-on-tone counters, 18-carat white gold hands and hour markers in rhodium-toned 18-carat pink gold filled with luminescent material. Mother-of-pearl is the reason this works. A flat pink lacquer at this size would have read as a themed watch, the kind of thing that turns up in a gift guide; nacre has depth and irregularity built into it, so the colour shifts across the surface like the inside of a scallop shell rather than sitting there as a single hue.

Look closely and the layout is sensible rather than decorative. The hour counter sits at three, the minute counter at nine, small seconds run at six, and the date jumps instantly into a window between four and five o'clock. Water resistance is 50 metres, which is a rain and a hand basin, not a swim.

Calibre 6401, doing the unglamorous work

Calibre 6401 is Audemars Piguet's own integrated chronograph movement, entirely developed in house, and it runs at 4Hz with 44 jewels, 350 parts and a 55-hour power reserve, from a movement 27mm across and 5.7mm thick. The vertical clutch is patented and has been simplified to use fewer parts, which is the sort of engineering nobody photographs and everybody benefits from, because fewer parts in a clutch means fewer things to go out of adjustment between services.

Fifty-five hours is the figure I keep turning over. It is enough to carry the watch from Friday evening to Sunday morning and not quite enough to carry it to Monday, which means an integrated chronograph in 2026 still asks you to reset it after a weekend off. I do not think that is a failing so much as a reminder of what a chronograph movement costs in space and torque once you have also insisted it be 5.7mm thick.

Two ways to wear it

Turn the watch over and the sapphire case back shows a 22-carat pink gold oscillating weight, which picks up the dial rather than the case, and is the one flash of warmth in an otherwise white watch. The ceramic bracelet closes on an AP folding clasp, and Audemars Piguet has packed a second option in the box: a pink rubber strap studded with white ceramic and fastened with a titanium AP folding clasp.

That second strap is the more interesting inclusion, because a ceramic bracelet is heavy and unforgiving in the heat, and a rubber alternative turns a formal object into something you could plausibly wear to a match.

Royal Oak Selfwinding Chronograph "Serena Williams" pricing and availability

The watch is a limited edition, and Audemars Piguet points buyers to its boutique network to find one. The brand has published neither a price nor an edition size on its own site, and Australian availability has not been detailed.

The reason this release is worth more than a passing note is the restraint of it. There is no signature scrawled across the dial, no racquet motif, no tennis-ball yellow anywhere in the frame. What Audemars Piguet has done instead is spend the collaboration budget on white ceramic push-pieces and a nacre dial, and let the association sit in the name and on the case back. That is a harder brief than it looks, and plenty of maisons with longer ambassador lists have failed it comprehensively. This one has been played from the baseline rather than the net.