The functioning of a mechanical watch is based on the transmission of energy from the spring barrel (where energy is stored) to the display through a series of gears. To ensure the efficiency of that energy transmission within the watch, the pivot contacts that support the different gears are lubricated with watch oils or greases. However, in some cases, that lubricant can spread and be displaced outside of its dedicated contact area, increasing of friction and wear. The functioning of the device is therefore compromised. Accordingly, the goal of this thesis is to study and understand how to mitigate the spreading of liquid lubricants outside of their dedicated contact area, while maintaining favourable tribological properties (i.e. low and stable friction, and low wear). The spreading behaviour of different liquid lubricants (including traditional oils and ionic liquids) was assessed on different surfaces. The effects of the interfacial energies of the system and of surface textures were investigated. Even though the latter helped modifying the spreading of the lubricant, the use of surface texturation in the context of tribological contacts can be challenging. Indeed, textured surfaces are more prone to plastic deformation and wear for instance. The textures can be damaged or even destroyed, cancelling their effect on the spreading. Therefore, the use of lubricants that intrinsically spread less than traditional oils (thanks to the interfacial energies they provide) was proposed. As such, the lubricating behaviour of some ionic liquids was compared to that of a commercial watch oil in ruby-on-steel and ruby-on-nickel phosphorus contacts. Their lubricating mechanisms were described based on the global hydrodynamic friction, the drag force throughout the lubricant drop and the friction at asperity contacts occurring in the nominal contact. A friction model considering these three contributions was developed and allowed to describe the different experimental Stribeck curves of the studied lubricants. The importance of the viscosity of the lubricants and how the contact pressure modifies that viscosity was highlighted, in particular in the hydrodynamic regime. When asperity contacts dominated friction, the shear strength provided by the lubricant at these contacts and their surface area were key parameters. The interfacial behaviour of ionic liquids was studied and its influence on the asperity friction could be rationalized over several orders of magnitude in load. The adsorption of the ionic films on the surfaces and the cohesion between the adsorbed ionic layers largely influenced the interfacial shear strength. The efficiency of the tested oil to provide low shear strength at the asperity contacts was strongly dependent on the contacting materials (ruby-on-steel versus ruby-on-nickel phosphorus) and relied on the oil's composition and its additives. Finally, the spreading and tribological properties of ionic liquid/oil mixtures were tested. These lubricating solutions exhibited both reduced wetting compared to the traditional oils and favourable tribological properties in the different lubrication regimes tested