With the new-for-2022 Rolex Day-Date 36 & Day-Date 40 watches in platinum, the first-ever platinum fluted bezel debuts on “a Rolex model,” which is what Rolex likes to call its watches. Although the Day-Date remains every rolex falsi bit the dress watch joker card it’s ever been, it also marks the demise of a long-established Rolex design code. Let’s see what that was, revisit a bit of Rolex history, and discover how the platinum Day-Date performs with its shiny new bezel on.

Rolex is in the fortunate position of owning long-established watch design staples, “emblematic features” that have been hard-wired into people’s brains over a long series of decades. There are some fascinating examples to consider. Rolesor, i.e., the “two-tone” color combination of steel and gold, has been around repliche orologi on a Rolex since the early 1930s. (The Rolesor name was trademarked in 1933). The five-piece link Jubilee bracelet looks largely unchanged since it debuted on the Datejust in 1945, as does the three-piece link Oyster bracelet that’s been around since the early 1940s. What the heck, most Rolex model lines comfortably go back 60-70 years or more into the past with largely uninterrupted lineages — again, cementing Rolex visual codes into the public consciousness.

Likewise, the fluted bezel — the precious metal external frame around the front crystal of the watch that features nearly 200 reflective facets — goes all the way back to the first Oyster case in 1926. In its more decorative form, the form we know and love today, the fluted bezel was present on the first-ever Rolex Datejust in 1945 and the first-ever Rolex Day-Date in 1956. For around 80 years, the spectacular repliche-orologi.com fluted bezel has lived through many carefully revised iterations until it arrived at its current generation that is crafted with a level of precision (especially in the consistency of the flatness of its facets and the straightness of its ridges) unrivaled by any other high-volume producer of luxury watches.

As far as I know, for all of those eight decades, fluted bezels have exclusively been crafted from 18k-gold, and no other material. If you saw a Rolex with a fluted bezel, you knew it was 18k yellow gold, 18k white gold, or Everose gold. There have been so-called engine-turned bezels on Air-King, Datejust, and other references crafted from steel, and although those also featured some polished surfaces Rolex Replica and grooves around, none of them were true fluted bezels — and you wouldn’t mistake an engine-turned bezel for a fluted one. By contrast, platinum bezels on Rolex watches have always been either domed, gem-set, or graduated with raised and polished numerals. You didn’t forget the platinum bezel Yacht-Master models, did you?