Rolex Dress Dials versus Rolex Sports Dials

A Rolex dial is a beautiful canvas that must be intricately designed and thought out for the time to be easily legible. It is an important aesthetic component of a watch. The right one makes the watch.

Taking a closer look at Rolex dress dials reveals a variety of styles. With different colors, materials textures and index styles, there is a wide selection of Rolex dress dials. Typically, the most popular Rolex dress dials are the colored brass ones including champagne, silver, white and black. We talk about how Rolex colors different dial types here. We also discuss how they create textured dials which is commonly used on Rolex dress dials.

Some more unique Rolex dress dials include different material like hard stone, mother-of-pear, meteorite, and once, even wood. Ladies style dress dials feature flowers and butterflies. Additionally, you can also find lavishly decorated dials covered in diamonds usually, but sometimes, rubies, emeralds and sapphires are used.

Taking a look at the indices, they can range from traditional Roman numerals to classic Arabic numerals to precious diamonds. Most Rolex dress dials we see today use straight baton hands, but vintage Rolex watches feature a more decorative style.

Rolex sports watches typically follow a similar construction. Rolex Submariner, Sea-Dweller, Deepsea, GMT-Master II, and Explorer II are a combination of circular, triangular, and rectangular lume-filled hour markers. A solid dial color is often chosen with the most common choice being black, and they feature a pair of Mercedes-style hands at the center.

As with all things with Rolex, dials have evolved over the years. Rolex watches from around the 1950s to the 1960s have gilt dials which have either radium or tritium material used for the luminescence. These lumes have developed a warm patina over time. Matte dials replaced these gilt dials around the mid-1960s. The white markers on the black background are very legible.

The more modern Rolex models have gloss dials, but the markers are still white. Gold now surrounds them though. Yellow gold and two-tone vintage GMT-Master and Submariner models have nipple dials - or dials with protruding hour markers. A Serti dial features gem-set hour markers.

Choosing a watch band to complement your Rolex dial is important. You don’t want to overpower the creativity and beauty, but you want to really help it shine. We can help you choose the right style here, and you can see countless combinations on our Instagram page here.