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Shinola cuts a Vinton dial from fossilised juniper, and adds a gold one alongside it

Two new dials for the 38mm Vinton, one of them a slice of petrified wood from the Pacific Northwest, and neither pretending to be anything other than quartz.

Hen & Mills Editorial · 4 min read · 24 August 2026

• Shinola has added two dials to its 38mm Vinton, one cut from petrified juniper and one a circular-brushed vapor gold, both running quartz movements.
• The petrified wood dial is fossilised timber from the Pacific Northwest, so the grain, the seam and the colour differ on every single watch.
• Both references are US$800 on quick-release three-link bracelets, sold direct by Shinola, neither of them limited and neither given an Australian price.

We have all watched the stone dial go from a rarity worth crossing a room for to a thing that turns up on a Tuesday, and somewhere in the last two years the novelty quietly drained out of it. Aventurine, malachite, meteorite, tiger's eye: every one of them arrived as a small miracle and left as a colourway. So it is a genuine surprise to find the freshest version of the idea on an American quartz watch that costs eight hundred dollars, in the shape of the new Shinola Vinton Petrified Wood.

A tree that turned into a rock, and then into a dial

Petrified wood is not stone that looks like timber. It is timber that has become stone, cell by cell, as mineral-rich water works through fallen wood and replaces the organic structure with silica while leaving the grain exactly where it was. Shinola has cut its dials from petrified juniper out of the Pacific Northwest, which means the thing under the crystal was a tree, then spent an unimaginable stretch becoming a rock, and is now telling you it is twenty past ten.

The result reads warm rather than mineral. The grain runs in bands of amber and rust with a darker seam cutting down the right of the dial, closer to the colour of a well-used cast iron pan than to anything you would call a gemstone, and it shifts as the light moves across it. Shinola prints the usual disclaimer that no two dials will match, and for once that is not marketing: the seam sits differently on every slab.

Against it sit brushed gold indexes, polished gold hands with C1 lume and a polished gold seconds hand tipped in orange. There is no date, which is the correct decision. A date window punched into a piece of fossilised juniper would have been an act of vandalism.

Vapor gold is a stranger name than the watch deserves

The second dial is the odd one out in the best way. Shinola calls it Vapor Gold, which sounds like a scent, and it is in fact a restrained circular-brushed champagne that catches light evenly right across the face rather than throwing it about. Matte black printed numerals with matte black outlines anchor the hours, the hands are matte black with C1 lume, and again the seconds hand carries an orange tip.

This one does have a date, at three, and it runs on a polished PVD gold case with a matching gold three-link bracelet. Where the petrified wood version is a natural material doing the talking, the vapor gold is a study in tone-on-tone restraint, and I suspect it will be the one people are still wearing in five years while the fossil dial gets the attention now.

Quartz, and no apology offered for it

Both watches measure 38mm across and 9.37mm deep with an 18mm lug width, under a double-domed sapphire crystal, and both are rated to 5 ATM. That last figure means splashes and hand washing rather than swimming, which is the honest limit of a dress-adjacent watch and worth saying out loud before somebody takes one into the surf at Bondi.

The movements are Shinola's Argonite quartz calibres, the 713 in the no-date Petrified Wood and the 715 with date in the Vapor Gold, both printed on the dial in the brand's usual manner and both assembled in Detroit. Enthusiasts will grumble, and the grumble is not entirely wrong at eight hundred dollars. But a quartz movement is also the only sensible way to put a slice of fossilised juniper under sapphire at this price, and a mechanical Vinton at the same money would have arrived with a stamped dial and nothing to look at.

Turn either one over and you get a solid caseback and a bracelet that comes off without tools, which on a 38mm watch that will spend its life alternating between a shirt cuff and a bare wrist is more useful than an exhibition window would have been.

Shinola Vinton Petrified Wood and Vapor Gold pricing and availability

Both references are US$800, sold direct by Shinola, and both come on the quick-release three-link bracelet as standard. The Petrified Wood is reference S0120494153-1-PetrfdWood-38-USA on polished stainless steel; the Vapor Gold is S0120494149-1-VaporGld-38-USA in polished PVD gold. Neither is limited. Shinola prices in US dollars and has not published an Australian figure, which for a brand that builds its whole identity around one American city is not exactly a shock.

Here is where I have changed my mind while writing this. I came to the petrified wood dial expecting to file it with every other stone-faced watch of the last two years and to say something world-weary about the category. Then I looked at the brand's own close-ups and realised the material is doing something the minerals cannot, because a grain has direction and a piece of malachite does not. You are looking at the inside of a tree. Whatever else you think of an eight hundred dollar quartz watch from Detroit, that is a better idea than most of what the Swiss have cut up this year.