it's been an eventful six weeks learning more about your favorite brands in our in focus series and we're ending with a bang with three more things you didn't know about rolex catch more stories over on our blog at URL_TOKEN link in the description and keep an eye out for the article suggestions popping up in the top corner along the way so to wrap three things you didn't know about your favorite brand rolex looking to buy sell or exchange a premium watch visit watchfinder the pre-owned watch specialist if you enjoy these videos and want us to make more please do make sure to subscribe and click the notification bell thank you as a business rolex has that rare ability not just to be an icon in and of itself but also be an icon made of icons where else in the watch industry will details as small and seemingly insignificant as a date magnifying window three-piece bracelet design or our hand be so immediately recognizable given other manufacturers frequent attempts to recreate these totems it demonstrates just how much visual ownership rolex commands and that even boils down to color think red and blue and you think rolex gmt master from the word go in NUMBER_TOKEN the gmt master has championed the unexpected but now equally iconic pepsi color scheme to differentiate night and day that seminal reference NUMBER_TOKEN could just have easily been blue and black or red and black as we've come to see on later gmt masters and any other combination therein but it wasn't it could have been split higher or lower on the bezel like grand seiko's spgjNUMBER_TOKEN but it wasn't those seemingly arbitrary colors and placements designed in collaboration with pan am pilots for contrast and readability set the benchmark upon which all other gmt watches would be based so when the gmt master carried the responsibility for introducing the ceramic bezel to rolex's lineup in NUMBER_TOKEN cerakron as the brand called it the big question on everyone's lips was when will the ceramic pepsi be here there was no question of if the fans demanded it for a long while there wasn't even a two-tone ceramic gmt master we had to wait until NUMBER_TOKEN eight years later to get the now famous but not as famous blue and black what gives well for all its benefits in scratch resistance and fade protection the silicon-based ceramic used by rolex does have some compromises with the previous gmt master bezel the raw aluminium could simply be anodised one colour on one half and the other on the other more easily done with a split right down the middle but ceramic is different the pigmentation of the basic ceramic material is both limited in range and uniform in hue and benefits from a chemical treatment to realize the final colour fine for a solid shade like black but for two tone it presents a problem rolex backed itself into a corner by insisting it wouldn't glue two pieces together and so came a problem that took a decade to solve except it didn't ever get solved not really for NUMBER_TOKEN's blue and black bezel the solution was fairly simple make a blue bezel and chemically treat one half to be black that's fine because the black is dark enough to hide the base blue pigment underneath but for red and blue two colours much more similar in brightness and saturation the trick didn't work quite so well i expect rolex hoped the black and blue option would appease customers but it didn't it had taken eight years to
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