About this watch

Reference 126505 is the Cosmograph Daytona in 18 ct Everose gold with the bright black and Sundust dial. Sundust is Rolex's own name for that pale warm gold in the counters, and it is a more considered choice than it first appears. A chronograph dial has a job most dials do not. While the watch is running you need to find three counters instantly, which is why the classic steel panda puts white registers on black and lets raw contrast do the work. In gold that same hard separation looks wrong — the case is warm, the markers are warm, and a stark white register fights both of them. Sundust drops the contrast by a stop or so and lets the counters sit inside the dial rather than read as holes punched through it. You still find them at a glance; you stop noticing them when you are not timing anything. Everything else on the watch is one metal. Case, bracelet, hour markers, and a fixed bezel with the tachymetric scale engraved directly into the Everose rather than set into an insert — the dial is the only surface where anything other than gold happens, which is why that two-tone decision carries the whole design. Calibre 4131, self-winding chronograph, approximately 72 hours of power re…