When the red turns pink

The Rolex GMT-Master was made for travel. It lets you read the time in two places on the same watch, useful when the place you have arrived is several hours ahead of the one you left. Rolex introduced it in 1955. It later became the official watch of Pan Am, whose pilots were flying between continents.

The extra hand is what makes the second time possible. It travels around the face once every twenty-four hours and points to a numbered ring around the outside. The ordinary hands can show local time while the extra hand shows another place's time. On the red-and-blue version, the colors divide the ring into daytime and nighttime hours.

That ring gives the watch much of its appearance, too. The bright colors surround a black face in a steel case. Collectors call the combination Pepsi, after the red and blue of the drinks logo. It has appeared on successive generations of the watch, including the later GMT-Master II.

One of those generations is reference 16710. Its colored ring is made of aluminum and fits into the rotating bezel, the metal surround of the watch's face. On some examples the red has faded to pink.

A close-up published by the dealer Wind Vintage shows the difference clearly. The blue half of the ring looks deep and strong beside the pale pink. Within the black face, the extra hand is bright red. The dealer describes the insert as faded; the photograph does not establish whether it is the watch's original insert.

Rolex had chosen aluminum for durability, replacing the original GMT-Master's plastic insert in 1959. Later it developed a ceramic version that resists scratches and fading from ultraviolet light. The first ceramic GMT-Master II insert appeared in black in 2005; red and blue followed in 2014.

That improvement makes sense for a watch someone might wear for years. Red and blue can stay red and blue. But the older watch in the photograph has acquired a different appeal: pink beside dark blue, with the red hand crossing the black face. A fresh red-and-blue insert would recover the familiar colors while losing the shade that makes this example different.