News · Venezianico

Venezianico grew the blue: the Nereide Opale Blu and its lab-made opal dial

Six hundred pieces, a 0.4mm sheet of lab-grown blue opal from Kyocera, and a tungsten bezel insert rated at 9 on the Mohs scale, on the 42mm Nereide case.

Hen & Mills Editorial · 4 min read · 22 August 2026

• Venezianico has fitted its 42mm Nereide diver with a dial cut from lab-grown blue opal, grown by Kyocera in Japan rather than mined.
• The colour is a property of the grown material rather than a coating, worked from a sheet just 0.4mm thick and finished by hand in house.
• Limited to 600 pieces at €1,350, priced in euros for every market, with the brand publishing no separate Australian figure.

Stone dials have been everywhere for four or five years now, and most of us have reached the stage of scrolling past them. The formula got tired quickly: cut a slab of something geological, drop it behind a sapphire, add three hundred euros to the price and let the word aventurine do the rest. So I came at this one ready to be unimpressed, and then got stuck on the fact that the material is not stone at all, and was not cut out of anything. The watch is the Venezianico Nereide Opale Blu, and its dial was grown.

The blue is not a finish, it is the material

The opal comes from Kyocera's laboratories in Japan, which Venezianico says is the only facility in the world producing it by this particular proprietary process. That matters more than it sounds. This is not a pale opal that has been tinted or backed with blue, and it is not a coating: the material itself is grown blue, so the colour goes all the way through. What you see shifting across the dial as your wrist moves is structure rather than surface, which is why it behaves like the flash inside a beetle's shell rather than like paint.

The composition is 80 per cent silica and 20 per cent resin, and the sheet Venezianico works from is 0.4mm thick. Anyone who has handled thin mineral sheet will guess what that means for the workshop: it is simultaneously very hard and very easy to destroy. The brand cuts, drills, polishes and hand-applies the indices in house, gradually, because there is no way to hurry any of those steps without turning an expensive sheet into expensive gravel. Growth time is long and yields are small, which is the actual reason the batches are tiny.

Forty-two millimetres, and a bezel harder than most of what will hit it

The case is 316L stainless steel, 42mm across, 49mm lug to lug and 12.5mm deep. Forty-nine millimetres is the figure to read rather than the forty-two: on a diver of this size, lug to lug is what decides whether the case ends before your wrist does, and 49mm keeps it well inside the bone on most arms. Water resistance is 200 metres, which is more than the dial will ever ask for and exactly what the collection name implies.

The bezel insert is tungsten, polished, and rated at 9 on the Mohs scale. That number does a lot of quiet work. Sapphire sits at 9 too, and hardened steel is somewhere down around 6, so the part of a dive watch that traditionally collects the first scar is here made of something that shrugs off the door frames and car keys that would mark an aluminium or steel insert within a month. Under it the crystal is sapphire with anti-reflective coating.

Legible, in spite of everything the dial is doing

The risk with a dial this busy is that you end up with jewellery that cannot tell the time. Venezianico has handled it by keeping everything above the dial bright and simple: polished applied indices, broad hands filled with Swiss BGW9 Super-LumiNova, and a date at three that sits in a plain aperture rather than trying to blend in. In the brand's own photographs the markers read clearly against the opal even where the material is at its most active, which is more than some stone-dial watches manage in their own press shots.

Underneath is a Sellita SW200-1, and Venezianico has not pretended otherwise. It is a workhorse automatic, and at this price it should be, because the money has gone into the dial. What the brand has done is dress the visible part properly: the rotor starts as brass, gets skeletonised and engraved, then takes a radial Côtes de Genève finish with soleil brushing on the outer sections before rhodium plating. That is more attention than a SW200 usually receives.

Where I land on it

I want to plant a flag on the case size, because it is the one thing here I would change. Forty-two millimetres is the right size for the Nereide as a dive watch and the wrong size for a dial you are buying to look at, since a smaller version of this material would be denser and more concentrated, and lab-grown opal at 38mm would be quite something. Venezianico clearly disagrees, and the collection's proportions are the collection's proportions. I understand the decision. I would still take the smaller one.

The rest I have no quarrel with. An Italian dive watch with a Japanese dial and a Swiss movement, named after a submarine, is exactly the sort of thing a city that made its living on other people's trade routes would produce.

Venezianico Nereide Opale Blu pricing and availability

The Nereide Opale Blu is limited to 600 pieces and sold direct through Venezianico, which prices in euros for every market, so there is no separate Australian figure to quote. It costs €1,350, comes in dedicated packaging with an iridescent blue finish, and carries no published reference number. Venezianico does not put an on-sale date on the product page; according to Oracle of Time, it goes on sale on 25 August.