Rolex Oyster Perpetual watches

The Rolex Oyster Perpetual is the brand's automatic, waterproof watch line, and its two words also appear across the rest of the Rolex range. In 1926 Hans Wilsdorf acquired a patent for a screwed-down crown, and Rolex released the Oyster, its first waterproof watch, later that year. In 1931 the Oyster Perpetual added an automatic movement, so called because it did not need to be wound by hand.

Rolex revised the collection on 1 September 2020. It added a 41 mm model and fitted both the new Oyster Perpetual 41 and the Oyster Perpetual 36 with the then-new calibre 3230, with Superlative Chronometer certification and a Chromalight display that glows blue in low light. The 41 arrived with a silver sunray dial with 18-carat yellow gold hands and markers, or a black sunray dial with white gold ones. The 36 gained lacquered dials in candy pink, turquoise blue, coral red, yellow and green. The same revision retired the 39 mm and 26 mm sizes and left five: 41, 36, 34, 31 and 28 mm.

The six-digit reference tells the size. The 41 mm is the 124300 and the 28 mm the 276200, while the 36, 34 and 31 mm sizes each appear under two references: 116000 and 126000, 114200 and 124200, and 177200 and 277200. The 39 mm 114300 and the 26 mm 176200 belong to the sizes Rolex dropped in 2020. The suffix after the hyphen marks the dial. The bright turquoise, red, yellow and green dials turn up on the 41 mm 124300, the 36 mm 126000 and the 31 mm 277200, all in steel cases under sapphire.