The man is Robert Downey Jr. His watch is the Greubel Forsey Double Tourbillon Technique. The price of said piece? A cool $560,000. The event is monumental: he and a handful of his fellow Avengers are being knighted as Hollywood royalty in front of the legendary Chinese Theater in Los Angeles. The cement, meanwhile? The cement is—oh, God—it’s wet. When it comes time for the group to leave their handprints, Downey dips his hands into the goo. Which is what is supposed to happen, until the cement gets greedy and starts making for his arm—and the more-than-half-a-million-dollar watch strapped to it.

But Jeanne Yang, Hollywood’s go-to watch stylist (as well as an in-demand regular celebrity stylist) wasn’t worried: the Greubel Forsey was chosen for a reason: it had a plastic wristband and sapphire protecting both sides of the case. “We had to quickly rinse it off,” Yang tells me over the phone, but in the end the piece was untouched. “[The watch] was totally fine,” she says. “It didn't get hurt or anything.”

Downey and his Greubel Forsey before its swim in cement Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images

Yang’s day job involves styling celebs like Downey, Keanu Reeves, Christian Bale, Jason Momoa (she was the one working with Fendi to find a pink fabric for the suit-matching scrunchie Aquaman wore to the Oscars), and Alexander Skarsgard. Increasingly, as men invest more of their time and money into finding the perfect watch, finishing off a look means finding the right timepiece, and Yang’s skill in that realm lies in finding the right balance between person, event, and timepiece. And while Yang notes that she’s a stylist first, she's always held a bone-deep belief that her work is not truly done until there is a watch in the mix. To Yang, the watch is many things: “It’s the salt and pepper,” she says. “You know when you go have a meal and you feel like it's really great, it's beautiful but it's missing one thing?” Or try this: “It's that little bit of punctuation. If you've ever read anything that's not been punctuated, how are you supposed to read a piece unless there's a period or an exclamation point? Or even more simply put: “A man's arm looks bare sometimes without it,” Yang says.

Yang says her appreciation for timepieces “was just something that I eventually became known for.” One of those name-making occasions was the 2010 Golden Globes, when Downey, who won the award for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy for his titular role in Sherlock Holmes that night, wore a vintage Harry Winston watch strapped over his sleeve. The move—made famous by Gianna Agnelli, the immaculately dressed late head of Fiat who style-obsessed men obsess over—was not a hard sell for Downey on. “He's like, “That sounds amazing,’” Yang recalls.