Pepsi, Batman and the Names Rolex Will Never Print

Rolex prints codes. Collectors name pets.

Rolex would like you to ask for a GMT-Master II with a two-colour Cerachrom insert in red and blue ceramic. Collectors won't, and never have. They ask for a Pepsi, the authorised dealer knows exactly what they mean, and somewhere in Geneva an employee who has spent a career learning to say "bidirectional rotatable bezel" quietly winces. None of the names in this guide came from the people who make the watches. They came from the people who live with them, and that is most of the fun.

The official language is a stack of French abbreviations bolted onto a reference number. BLRO is bleu/rouge, BLNR is bleu/noir, GV is a green crystal the English brochure will only ever call a green sapphire. It is precise and it is unlovable, and it seems to have been designed so that nobody outside the trade could hold it in their head for longer than a lunch. So collectors did what people do with anything they actually live with and named it after what it looked like: a soda can, a comic-book character, a frog, an actress who never went near the thing. The names stuck partly because they are easier to remember than 126710BLRO, and partly because a steel sports watch this serious could use a little silliness.

The GMT-Master, the Submariner and the Daytona each have their own history on this site, so this one stays out of their way. It's a guide to the names: where each came from, which are decades-old dealer slang, which crawled out of a forum thread at two in the morning, and which ones can still start an argument at a get-together.

The soda machine that ate the GMT

The GMT-Master is the most nicknamed family Rolex makes, and it all started with a drink Rolex never ordered. The red-and-blue bezel on the original was meant as a day/night split for pilots; collectors looked at it, ignored the aviation, and saw a can of Pepsi. The name has since stretched to cover every red-and-blue GMT ever made, from the Bakelite-bezel 6542 through the long-running 1675 and 16750, the 16710 with its swappable inserts, the current steel 126710BLRO, the white-gold 126719BLRO and even the earlier white-gold 116719BLRO. Rolex still says bleu/rouge, and is more or less alone in that.

Coke came along with the first GMT-Master II, the 16760, which wore a red-and-black insert: same logic, darker drink. The 16710 kept the option going for years, and although there hasn't been a Coke in the range for some time, people keep asking for one in the tone of voice you'd use with a vending machine that has merely run out. Root Beer is the brown one. Gold and brown on the two-tone 1675/3 and 16753, then on the later two-tone GMT-Master IIs like the 16713, and now brown-and-black ceramic on the 126711CHNR and the Everose 126715CHNR. If you have ever held a can of A&W you already understand the etymology.

Sprite is the newest of the sodas and the only one that also had to explain a crown on the wrong side. When Rolex put a green-and-black ceramic bezel on the left-handed 126720VTNR in 2022, tradition demanded that a drink be nominated. A few people tried Green Lantern. Italian collectors, who already had a word for a watch built for the right wrist, said Destro. Sprite won, mostly because once you own Pepsi, Coke and Root Beer the vending machine is simply the house style. Nobody seriously proposed a Fanta. Rolex doesn't do orange bezels, and the nicknamers, for once in their lives, showed some restraint.

When the soda machine ran out, they hired Batman

The 116710BLNR of 2013 was the first GMT with a two-colour ceramic bezel, a sentence nobody has ever said at a bar. What people said at the bar was that the blue-and-black insert looked like a black eye, so for a while it was the Bruiser, until Batman turned up and won. The Dark Knight colours stuck so firmly that the next two jokes in the family had to be told in the same universe.

Batgirl is where the fighting starts. When the same blue-and-black bezel arrived on the 126710BLNR in 2019 it came on a Jubilee bracelet, and a portion of the internet decided that five links made it a girl. Another portion said it was still a Batman, thank you, and that they weren't going to repeat a forum joke about a woman's costume. Rolex then muddied things further by offering the same reference on an Oyster, which killed the bracelet rule and left everyone arguing about which calibre was inside instead. These days it comes down to taste, and the purists have picked their name and are glaring at you.

Bruce Wayne is the civilian identity. The 126710GRNR of 2024 is grey and black, which is either Batman on a day off or Batman in a boardroom, depending on how much comic-book lore you are prepared to take on. Rolex described the palette as "the harmony of contrasts". Collectors, having already spent Batman, reached for the alter ego, and so the most understated nickname in the whole set belongs to a watch named after a billionaire who lives above a cave.

Kermit, Hulk, Starbucks, and a crystal Rolex will not nickname

Green is the house colour, so naturally it multiplied. When the 16610LV put a slightly yellowish green aluminium bezel on an otherwise black Submariner, the internet, which was younger then, looked at it and saw a Muppet. Kermit is that particular shade, and it's still what people mean when they talk about the original green Sub. The 116610LV went further, with a green dial to match the green bezel, and at that point the watch had visibly Hulked out. If you wanted less frog and more Marvel, that was your one.

Then Rolex did the Kermit again, more or less. The 126610LV of 2020 brought a darker green ceramic bezel back to a black dial in a bigger case, and the community promptly split. Half of it said Starbucks, because the cup is green and the coffee is black; the other half said Cermit, a ceramic Kermit, because some people simply cannot help themselves. Both names are still in circulation, neither has landed a knockout, and the Pepsi, for the record, never had this problem.

Glace Verte is the one that is nearly official. The Milgauss 116400GV has a green-tinted sapphire crystal that Rolex, in English at least, will only call a green sapphire; the GV in the reference stands for glace verte, green glass, a designation that lives in the code and nowhere on the box. Collectors use the French because it's the one occasion on which the factory left a clue lying around. Which leaves us with a nickname for a piece of glass, and a group of people arguing about the name of the glass, possibly the most Rolex-collector scene in this whole guide.

Named after people who never wore it, except when they did

The Explorer II 1655 is known as the Steve McQueen, which is awkward, because Steve McQueen never wore one. His Rolex was a Submariner and his film watch was a Heuer Monaco. The 1655 got his name anyway, and nobody quite agrees how: one version blames an Italian magazine that misidentified the watch, another a Rolex advertising campaign that used his image. Nobody has ever produced a photograph of him wearing one. The Italians, who are responsible for most of the good nicknames, also called it the Freccione, the big arrow, after its orange 24-hour hand, which has the advantage of describing the actual watch.

Sophia Loren never wore the 16760 either. Collectors looked at a case half a millimetre thicker than the one before, with bigger crown guards and a wider bezel, and reached for a voluptuous actress; the same watch is also the Fat Lady, which is the unkind version of the joke, and the Coke, which is just the bezel talking. Three nicknames for one reference, and not a single photograph of Loren in a GMT-Master II. Pussy Galore, by contrast, did appear on a wrist, though not the wrist people imagine: Honor Blackman wore a 6542 as the character in Goldfinger, and auction houses still print the name in the lot title. So the watch is named after a Bond girl, and the McQueen crowd might like to sit with the difference.

Then there are the people who really did wear the thing. Clint Eastwood wore a two-tone Root Beer 16753 often enough that the brown GMT picked up his name, though the first gold-and-brown bezel was actually the 1675/3. Paul Newman wore his exotic-dial Daytonas, a 6239 among them, in real life; the Daytona story tells that one properly, and it remains the rare celebrity nickname that also happens to be true. So the only rule that holds up is that you have to check. McQueen didn't wear his, Newman did wear his, and the names carry on regardless.

Big Crown, Polar, Panda, and the names the purists will not say

Some nicknames are older than the forums. Big Crown is old dealer shorthand for the 8 mm winding crown on the early Submariners that had no guards, which means the 6200, the 6538 and the 5510; the 6538 also picked up James Bond, because Sean Connery wore one in Dr. No, From Russia with Love and Goldfinger. King Sub means the 6200 specifically, the first of the big crowns, with an Explorer-style dial and a scarcity that left the nickname doing most of the explaining. Big Red is a Daytona 6263 with the word Daytona in large red letters over the six o'clock counter. Polar is a white-dial Explorer II, the 16550 first, then the 16570, then the 42 mm watches that followed, because a white face on a watch built for caves looked like snow. Panda is a white Daytona with black subdials; the 116500LN made the name a default and the 126500LN is the current steel one. President is the odd one out, since Rolex will actually print it, but only on the bracelet, while collectors use it for the whole Day-Date. None of these needed a superhero, just a dealer with a loud voice and a long lunch.

Then there are the names that make people flinch. Smurf, for the white-gold Submariner with a blue dial and blue bezel that began with the 116619LB, is beloved in listings and despised at dinner parties. Cookie Monster is the argument over its successor, the white-gold 126619LB with the blue bezel and a black dial: some listings still call it a Smurf, and most of the people who actually own one wish they wouldn't. Bluesy, for the two-tone blue Sub, started on the 16803 and runs through the 16613, the 116613LB and today's 126613LB, and it is so literal that even people who hate cute names have to admit it is accurate. Batgirl and Starbucks, as discussed, are hills people have chosen to die on. Wimbledon, for a Datejust like the 126234 with green-outlined Roman numerals, is tennis-partnership logic, and another name you will not find in a brochure.

The purists' position rarely changes: say the reference number, or say the colour, and leave the cartoon at the door. They will allow Pepsi, because the bezel genuinely looks like the can, and Freccione, because the hand genuinely is an arrow. They will not say Batgirl, and they would like you to know it. The rest of us will keep saying it anyway, on the grounds that a nickname that can still start an argument is doing its job.

The factory will never say Pepsi, and that is rather the point

Rolex has a vocabulary it did invent, and it is proud of it: Everose, Oystersteel, Rolesor, Cerachrom, Superlative Chronometer Officially Certified. It will describe a bezel as a two-colour Cerachrom insert in red and blue ceramic for as long as the sintering ovens are warm, and it will not, in any brochure, in any language, call that watch a Pepsi. The nicknames live in the other vocabulary, the one collectors built for themselves because nobody can remember the official one.

The names matter more than they probably should, because they are how a serious, expensive object gets treated like something familiar, and how a forum argument turns into a way of recognising a watch from across a room. The purists hate that sentence. The rest of us say it while tilting a Batman on a Jubilee toward the light. Live with a Rolex long enough and it turns into a sort of pet, and pets get nicknames. Rolex will never print Pepsi on a box, and it can grit its teeth all it likes. The field guide got written anyway, by us.