Rolex Nicknames Decoded: Pepsi, Hulk, Batman and the Rest

Rolex does not name its watches after soft drinks. Collectors do, dealers repeat it, and eventually the nickname becomes the way a reference is bought and sold. Knowing the vocabulary is not trivia — it is how you search, how you compare and how you avoid paying a nickname premium for the wrong reference.

GMT-Master II bezels

Pepsi — red and blue. 1675, 16710, 116719BLRO, 126710BLRO, 126719BLRO. Batman — blue and black; Batgirl is the same bezel on a Jubilee bracelet. 116710BLNR, 126710BLNR. Coke — red and black. 16710 only. Root Beer — brown and black, in Everose Rolesor. 126711CHNR, and the vintage 1675/3 and 16753. Sprite — green and black, left-handed. 126720VTNR.

Submariners

Kermit — green bezel, black dial, 16610LV, made for the fiftieth anniversary in 2003. Hulk — green bezel and green dial, 116610LV. Starbucks — green bezel, black dial, 126610LV, the 41mm successor to the Kermit. Bluesy — two-tone with a blue dial and bezel, 116613LB and 126613LB. Smurf — white gold, blue dial and bezel, 116619LB.

And in vintage: Red Sub (1680 with red Submariner text), Big Crown (6538), COMEX (dive-company issued examples, heavily faked).

Daytonas

Paul Newman — the exotic Singer dials on manual-wind references. Panda — white dial with black sub-dials; reverse panda is the inverse. Zenith Daytona — the 16520 generation with the modified El Primero. Patrizzi — 16520s whose sub-dial rings have oxidised to brown, named after the auctioneer who identified them.

Explorer and Sea-Dweller

Freccione or Steve McQueen — the 1655 Explorer II with the orange arrow hand. McQueen never wore one; the name stuck anyway. Polar — the white-dialled Explorer II. Great White — the 1665 Sea-Dweller with white text. Double Red — the 1665 with two lines of red text. D-Blue — the Deepsea with the blue-to-black gradient dial, made for James Cameron.

Why the names move money

A nickname concentrates demand. Two references with near-identical specifications can differ substantially in price purely because one has a name that people search for and the other does not.

That is worth knowing in both directions: the nicknamed reference costs more, and the un-nicknamed sibling is frequently the better value.

The ones to be careful with

Nicknames attached to vintage rarities — Paul Newman, COMEX, Double Red — carry enormous premiums and are the most heavily faked categories in the market. A "Paul Newman dial" is a claim requiring specialist verification, not a description.

If a nickname is doing most of the work in a listing, be more careful, not less.

Browse the collection

Search the Rolex nickname index or browse by model across the full collection.