Swiss brand Rado has spent much of the past 25 years perfecting the use of high-tech ceramics in watchmaking. It makes sense, then, that it built a unique reputation for suitably space-age looking watches to match the technology it was pioneering. Retro it was not. First developed to protect the nose cone of the Nasa Space Shuttle, ceramic (or zirconium oxide) is a fine powder injected into molds and then heated to extreme temperatures to solidify into a material ten times harder than gold but two and a half times lighter. Hypoallergenic and very resistant to scratching, ceramic is in many ways the wonder material of the watch world, but it’s a royal pain to work with—it shrinks 23 percent during the firing process and it’s particularly hard to create new colors.