Trying to avoid Rolex…

Throughout my growing love of watches there has never been a moment when Rolex has figured in my path to enjoying the perfect ‘one watch collection’.

There are many reasons for this including the price, the designs which feel too traditional and dare I say it too old for me, and at times the sheer over the top forms that scream look at me! They do not work for my particular taste and so I have tended to avoid them in real life and on the internet.

I wrote an article yesterday about Vintage Today Watches, whom I visited last week, and Pascal, who owns the store, made a valid point when I mentioned why I would never own a Rolex. He said that I likely did not like the Rolex owners I had met rather than the watches themselves, and after thinking about it I realised that he may be right.

You see, I know a few people who own garish gold Rolex watches which they bought when they reached a certain stage of financial security, and as it happens they tend to be dicks. It’s not the watches that annoy me or the fact that they like to show off their watches at every possible opportunity, or the fact that they only bought them because they wanted to prove their success and so they chose Rolex, or the fact that they went for the biggest and most obvious models they could get. It is the fact they are dicks and so I tend to associate the watches with their dickness. In my head a dick wearing a watch is thus wearing a ‘dickwatch’.

I am of course wrong because I know two people who own Oyster Perpetuals and they are great people. They just love the watch and both bought them to celebrate a special time for them, and they never talk about their watches. They just wear them and they enjoy them which is of course how it should be.

I got some time to play with a Perpetual earlier this week and my view about Rolex changed in a minute. Wow! Just wow! Specially, it was the Oyster Perpetual 39 with the light dial and I cannot explain how good its felt on the wrist. The simplicity of the time display, the sheer perfection of the bracelet and the case felt like nothing I had worn before, and that part of me that we all have, the part that knows we all secretly want a Rolex, started shouting at me.

And when I realised that it is priced at £4,350 my mind started to spin. That is of course not cheap in any way, but all of a sudden my ‘forever’ Black Bay Red didn’t feel quite so permanent. Oh god help me…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoO6L934JgU