Monday, March 18, 2019

2019 Rolex Baselworld Teaser



2019 

Rolex Baselworld Teaser

Interesting 3D Details

Rolex published this Baselworld teaser, and I believe I've discovered a bizarre design language clue hiding in plain sight. Notice when you watch the Rolex Baselworld 2019 Teaser trailer below how the light reflects and glistens off the Rolex crown, as well as off the two visible lines of text, which now look distinctively metallic silver as apposed to the standard flat white pad printing!!!



Reading Between the Lines

The watch in this video has to be a Submariner Date, GMT-Master or Yacht-Master, as the text under the Rolex crown logo reads "ROLEX. OYSTER PERPETUAL DATE." There are no other Rolex watches with this dial layout that I am aware of. The most interesting detail is the Rolex crown logo and the top two lines of text seem to be applied and/or chrome-plated!?!! For frame of reference, I am including a photo of the current Single-Red SEA-DWELLER, which has a super-flat, one-dimensional crown logo as well as lines of text.


The new logo and text could also be laser sintered. This is strange as the Submariner and GMT have never had applied text like this. And the last Submariner or GMT-Master to have an applied crown on the dial were the yellow gold Submariner and GMT-Master models with nipple indices. Also, I noticed the line spacing in the ROLEX dial designation seems to have increased line spacing.

The relatively new Everose Gold Rolex Yacht-Master (pictured below) may offer a clue as it appears to have this newer logo and ROLEX dial designation. I have never checked this detail up close, but it dawns on me Rolex could use a special heavier (meaning not flat) pad printing process that uses metal flakes to give the appearance of added three-dimensionality as we see in the picture below. On thing for certain is this design detail makes the watch look much more high-end...