GMT-Master, reference by reference

The Pan Am watch

• Made with Pan Am so its pilots and navigators could track two time zones: local time on the usual hands, home time or GMT on a red hand that goes round once a day, read off a 24-hour bezel. Red for the day hours, blue for the night.
• 38 mm, steel at first, later also 18k gold with a brown bezel and brown dial.
• The bezel insert was Bakelite with numerals painted in radium. It cracked easily, so within a few years Rolex switched to aluminium.
• No crown guards yet. Pussy Galore, a pilot, wears one in Goldfinger (1964), which is where the nickname comes from.

Twenty years of small changes

• A bigger 40 mm case with crown guards, pointed on the first ones and rounded from the mid-sixties. Aluminium bezel inserts from the start.
• Glossy gilt dials (gold print) until about 1966, then matte dials with white print. The gilt dials have a printed ring around the minute track, the chapter ring. Later dials drop it, and the minute marks run to the edge.
• The earliest dials say only “Officially Certified Chronometer”, and “Superlative” came a few years in. The lume moved from radium to tritium in the early sixties. The 24-hour hand has a small arrow at first, a bigger one later.
• Some red inserts from around 1966–72 have faded to pink: collectors call them Fuchsia. A dial that has faded to brown is called tropical.
• The all-blue Blueberry insert is a small mystery: a special order, or a service part? Nobody has shown which.
• The 1675/3 in steel and gold has a brown bezel: the Root Beer. A steel-and-gold GMT is also called the Clint Eastwood, after the one he wore in Firefox (1982).

Quickset date

• The second-to-last GMT-Master. A faster movement, calibre 3075, and a quickset date: the date moves by the crown, no more winding the hands through midnight.
• Matte dials at first. Like the Submariners and Explorer IIs of the time, some have cracked into a fine web: a spider dial. From about 1984 the dials are glossy, with the markers set in white gold.
• Still an acrylic crystal.

Fat Lady, the first GMT-Master II

• The big step: the hour hand can be set on its own, in one-hour jumps, without stopping the watch (calibre 3085). Until now you could only turn the bezel.
• The extra works made the case thicker, hence the Fat Lady, or Sophia Loren.
• The first red-and-black Coke bezel, an alternative to the Pepsi, and a sapphire crystal.
• Sold alongside the GMT-Master 16750, which stayed as the simpler, cheaper option.

The last GMT-Master

• Calibre 3175 and a sapphire crystal, but no independent hour hand: the GMT-Master without the II.
• Pepsi or black bezel. When it ended in 1999, so did the GMT-Master name, after 45 years.

The long one

• Slimmer than the Fat Lady, with calibre 3185 (3186 in the last couple of years). Made for eighteen years, so there are plenty around.
• Pepsi, Coke or all black, and the inserts swap, so many owners had all three.
• The lume dates it: tritium until 1998, then Luminova, then Super-LumiNova from about 2000.
• The last steel Pepsi for eleven years.

Ceramic

• A ceramic bezel insert (Cerachrom) that doesn't fade or scratch. It came first on the yellow-gold 116718LN in 2005, for the 50th anniversary.
• Calibre 3186 with about 48 hours of reserve, bigger “Maxi” markers in Chromalight, which glows blue, and a green 24-hour hand on the black 116710LN.
• Two colours in one piece of ceramic were hard, and red the hardest. So in 2013 came the blue-and-black Batman, the first two-colour ceramic bezel, while Rolex made no steel Pepsi at all.
• The Pepsi came back in ceramic in 2014, but only in white gold (116719BLRO), the first white-gold GMT. The usual story is that the red was so hard to get right that Rolex kept it to a small, expensive run.

The Jubilee is back

• Calibre 3285 with 70 hours of reserve. The Pepsi returned in steel in 2018 and the Batman moved to this movement in 2019, both on the five-link Jubilee bracelet, a nod to the seventies. The Oyster came back as an option in 2021.
• 2018 also brought the Root Beer back, in Everose gold (126711CHNR in steel and gold, 126715CHNR in solid gold).
• 2022: the green-and-black Sprite (126720VTNR), with the crown and date on the left. 2024: grey and black (126710GRNR). 2025: a white-gold Sprite with a green ceramic dial, Rolex's first.
• In spring 2026 the steel Pepsi quietly left the catalogue. Rolex didn't announce it.