The Latest From S.T. Dupont Is Perfect for Cigar and Watch Lovers

We live in interesting horological times — times with more watch and clock scholarship than ever before, available to more people, at the click of a mouse and the blink of an eye, than was possibly conceivable in the 20th century. The Quartz Crisis, which once endangered the entire mechanical watch industry, is well behind us, and mechanical watchmaking itself has never been stronger. Billions of dollars worth of spring-powered timepieces (effectively long-obsolete technology) were sold to a willing and excitable public last year. And there’s little sign — a bit of market correction notwithstanding — of that changing any time soon.

But I would argue that an even more exciting time was the early-to-mid 20th century. Think about it: The pocket watch was slowly giving way to the wristwatch; automatic winding was being developed and proliferating. Specialized timepieces were being developed for military use and then, after the World Wars, for recreational use by scuba divers, pilots and explorers. Best of all, however, was that luxury goods purveyors were putting small timepieces in all sorts of weird objects: money clips, belt buckles and lighters. Yes, lighters. Indeed, if you were to step into a time machine today and set it for the 1920s, you’d be greeted by a positive embarrassment of compelling timepieces hidden away in places that you’d never suspect.

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S.T. Dupont, a French firm that produces some of the world’s finest lighters, pens and other luxury accessories, has partnered with famed Swiss watchmaking maison Franck Muller on an incredible new product that aims to bring back some of the glitz and glamor of these early 20th-century goods: The new Master Lighter — the product of two years of research and development — bridges multiple disciplines, including complicated watchmaking, goldsmithing, hand guilloché and more, and updates the lighter-clock with a distinctly contemporary flair. Available in more restrained white- or blue-dial variants paired with palladium-plated brass housings, it also comes in an incredible, black PVD-plated version with a luminous dial, or in Franck Muller’s famous Color Dreams theme in which each index is a different brightly-colored shade.

Sure, the remit of a clock-equipped lighter in the 21st-century is somewhat vague. But this is a luxury product we’re talking about, here, and besides — this isn’t an instance of a simple, mass-produced movement being stuck into an unusual housing. On the contrary, the Master Lighter is a masterwork of both horology and metalworking: A modified, skeletonized movement with a three-day power reserve, developed by Franck Muller, is fitted within the lighter’s 31mm x 42.7mm x 4.7mm case with two different dials: While one side displays the house and minutes, the other reveals the skeletonized components along with a central seconds hand. (This feat is possible because the post containing the hands actually passes through the lighter’s gas reservoir.)

Such detailed engineering required careful coordination between the S.T. Dupont and Franck Muller teams and is a distinct testament to their skill and shared vision. The typical S.T. Dupont lighter characteristics, meanwhile — including the brand’s signature twin flame — are present and accounted for, as are the well-known traits of numerous Franck Muller watch collections: The white-dial variant, for instance, features silver sunray stamp decoration, while the Color Dreams includes faint guillochéd numerals that seem to float behind the colored indices. Besides the stunning dials, each clock-lighter features a beautifully decorated movement in which beveling, circular satin brushing and diamond cutting abound.

Finished in a Clous de Paris pattern, the palladium-coated brass housings of each Master Lighter make them perfect table accessories for the enthusiastic cigar smoker, while the hand-wound movement promises three continuous days of operation on a single wind. A hand-finished luxury good in the early 20th-century sense of the term, the S.T. Dupont X Franck Muller Master Lighter (limited to 88 pieces per color) will set you back $66,000-$76,000, depending on the configuration. But these days, given what one’s forced to pay for a box of 25 Partagas Series D No. 4s, the price doesn’t seem that outrageous!