Rolex Has an Emoji Watch. Yes Really

The luxury watch industry’s annual jamboree in Geneva—the Watches & Wonders show—is slightly bonkers even when the economy is not showing signs of strain. This year, cost-of-living crises, soaring inflation rates, supply chain issues, and the war in Ukraine were scarcely evident in the ultra-luxe halls of Geneva’s Palexpo exhibition center. After a bumper 2022, Switzerland’s watch power players are pushing their prices skyward and yet reporting no fall in demand or production. This is not least because the all-important Chinese market, which was still in Covid lockdown a year ago, is coming back online in a big way. Indeed, the higher the price of the watch, the faster it sells out. 

Creatively, the watch industry is in an exuberant mood. And though there is clearly not as much genuine innovation taking place in 2023 as last year—sadly, there’s no light-sucking cases, 3D-printed gold, or world-record timers thinner than a nickel—a riot of color, new material developments, and a healthy smattering of lab-grown diamonds should keep the WIRED watch fan interested. 

Perhaps as a reaction to the real-world troubles above, some watch companies have abandoned their steadfastly sensible approach and decided to have some fun: A Kermit the Frog piece from Oris is trumped by Rolex, of all brands, effectively committing the horological equivalent of getting slightly drunk and making a day/date that displays neither the day nor the date. Instead the limited edition Day-Date 36 Puzzle Motif whimsically replaces the days of the week with “Happy,” “Eternity,” “Gratitude,” “Peace,” “Faith,” “Love” and “Hope,” while the “date” window at 3 o’clock now reveals not numerals, but 31 emojis in sequence. These include a kissy face, a four-leaf clover, a heart, and a peace sign. It does not include a golden poop emoji. Yes, we asked.

Here are our other highlights from the show.

Oris has created a 3D-printed piece aimed at taking the manufacturing technique to new heights. For the case of its new ProPilot Altimeter, the brand worked with a Swiss startup, 9T Labs, that uses additive fusion technology (AFT) to make carbon fiber parts for the aerospace, automotive, and medical industries. Its two-stage process involves manufacturing a part through the precise layering of carbon-fiber strands before putting it through a high-pressure, high-heat molding treatment that strengthens the bonding of the layers and optimizes the profile and finish of the piece.

Having debuted the tech in a limited-edition watch last year, Oris is now applying it to what was already one of its most tech-forward models, the ProPilot Altimeter (£5,250, or $6,485). First seen in 2014, it contains a mechanical altimeter, with a dial displaying time, air pressure, and altitude. The new version is an upgrade on all fronts: The altimeter, which works by reading fluctuations in air pressure in a sealed chamber, now goes to 19,700 feet (up from 15,000); the power reserve is up from 38 hours to 56; and the carbon-fiber case reduces weight by 70 grams. At 46 mm, it’s a specialist item, only now a bit more special.

Hermes is also going for a strengthened take on carbon fiber, though it’s mixing the material with powdered graphene, which acts as a hardening agent for what’s otherwise an extremely lightweight watch case. Hermes describes its H08 watch, a softly square-form number introduced in 2021, as an “all-terrain watch with a sporty spirit,” and now the brand is pushing the sporty element in a series of iterations that pair the lightweight carbon/graphene case with colorful rubber straps and dial accents. Most importantly, it’s introducing a £13,100 chronograph version of the H08, also with the carbon/graphene case. Rather than disrupting the flow of the case profile with traditional chronograph stop/start/reset pushers, the chronograph is entirely operated by a single pusher set within the winding crown.

Along with the resurrection of chronographs, another theme for this year’s W&W is titanium. Numerous pieces employed this lightweight, strong, and corrosion-resistant material, and after competitive sailor Ben Ainslie was spotted wearing a prototype in 2021—and following Rolex’s first titanium timepiece, last year’s Deepsea Challenge—it came as little surprise to see the final version of the company’s Yacht-Master in grade 5 titanium. The 42-mm, £11,800 piece has a satin finish, apart from its crown guard, lug bevels, and bidirectional bezel, which are polished. An intense black dial adds to the aesthetic, while water resistance to 100 meters and a 70-hour power reserve make it functional too. 

The Odysseus range is German maker A Lange & Sohne’s entrant into the sports-luxe field: Launched in 2019, and made in tiny numbers, it’s rapidly become an investment-grade grail watch. The new Odysseus Chronograph (€135,000, or $146,256) is also A Lange & Sohne’s first automatic chronograph, and it takes a novel approach to a very traditional genre. Instead of sub-dials for stopwatch functions, as are found on most chronos, the stopwatch second and minute counters are both mounted centrally, so as not to obstruct the large day/date display. Discrete pushers (resembling protectors for the crown) set the date functions and operate the stopwatch elements, which offer a bit of eccentric, why-the-hell-not flair. When the chronograph is reset, the minute timing hand jumps immediately back to zero, but the second timing hand does a lighting-fast revolution for every minute timed before resting back at zero.

The launch edition of the Odysseus Chronograph, cased in steel with a black dial, is limited to just 100 pieces. You probably have more chance of being hit by a falling German piano than seeing one of these, let alone owning it.

For the past three years, the hottest name in watches has been Gerald Genta, a designer who died in 2011. His 1970s designs for Audemars Piguet and Patek Philippe, the Royal Oak and the Nautilus, respectively, have become arguably the world’s most collectible watches, making it unsurprising that IWC is now returning to the Ingenieur SL, a steel watch Genta designed in 1976. 

The new Ingenieur Automatic 40 (€5,300) is the brand’s third attempt to resuscitate the Genta classic in the past 20 years (the last iteration was a poorly received effort back in 2012), this time with a degree of modern polish, an up-to-date IWC movement with 72-hour power reserve, and a deluxe muscularity. There are three dial options, in black, white, or a rather arresting turquoise—each featuring a new take on the cross-hatch pattern that was a defining element of the original.

​​TAG Heuer has apparently set itself the task of pioneering the use of lab-grown diamonds in luxury watchmaking. The diamonds are all formed via a chemical vapor deposition process, in which carbon and hydrogen elements are bonded with a tiny seed of natural diamond via high-powered microwave radiation and grown into full diamonds. A year ago, TAG introduced the not-exactly-understated Carrera Plasma, which contained 4.5 carats of synthetic bling, created in sizes and shapes that would be near-impossible with natural diamonds.

This year, the brand has gone further still. The Carrera Plasma Diamant D’Avant-Garde, a chronograph with a tourbillon, is loaded with 124 diamonds that are recessed into the case, bezel, and bracelet in multiple geometries, as well as forming the winding crown, indexes, and the polycrystalline diamond slab that is the dial. The price? A cool half a million Swiss Francs, a smidge over $544,000. TAG has also introduced the first colored synthetic diamonds in watchmaking, with a 36-mm Carrera that features a large pink diamond in the middle of the crystalline dial and another as the winding crown.

Panerai goes somewhat steampunk with a watch that combines one of its oldest looks with one of its newest materials. Apple Watch owners will be all too familiar with the idiosyncratic charm of the “California dial” style, which uses both Roman and Arabic numerals. Featured in both Rolex and Panerai watches in the 1940s (Panerai watches were then made by Rolex), it was designed to bring instant clarity to watch dials. Rolex called this “Error Proof”—ironically, the “California” sobriquet is now recognized to have come from a California-based dial refinisher who specialized in faking such dials in the 1980s. Not that Panerai seems to mind the association: The name has stuck.

This $12,300 watch features an antiquated, velvety green dial, and Panerai has paired it with a case in eSteel, its modern alloy made from recycled scraps of pre-consumer steel, mostly harvested from watch industry waste parts. Modern it may be, but each case is then hand-finished and given an extra PVD coating to create a weathered feel that will no doubt polarize the brand’s dedicated Paneristi collectors.

Though its customers are supposedly looking after their watches for the next generation, Patek Philippe has realized that the next generation (or at least, you know, people under 50) is where things are actually at. The Calatrava, the brand’s simplest range of round, three-hand watches, was once the bastion of Patek-style conservatism, venerable styles conceived with heirloom status in mind. The $37,850 Reference 6007G is rather different: It may be a polished slab of white gold, but it’s sporty, versatile, and colorful enough to be worn casually, with the blocky hands and large, luminous numerals of a sports watch; a busy racetrack-style second index; and a distinctly graphic style. 

“Iterate, iterate, iterate” is the mantra of the watch world right now, a message that has even reached Planet Patek: This breezy trio is available with accents in yellow, red, or blue—all the better for matching with your Gen Z sneakers as you flit from super yacht to private jet to nightclub, or from a Zoom meeting to the fridge.

There was a time not long ago when watches got so large it felt like we’d never see “normal” case sizes again. Tudor has delved into its archives to produce a faithful recreation of its first dive watch, reference 7922, which came out in 1954. The $3,625 Black Bay 54 stays true to the original proportions with a 37-mm steel case. The unidirectional bezel is devoid of hash marks, and the “lollipop” second hand mimics that of the 7922 model. The “rivet-style” strap in metal or rubber adds a retro edge, while the movement, COSC-certified with a silicon balance spring, 70-hour power reserve, and 200 meters of water resistance, is anything but antiquated.