About this watch

Reference 126710BLNR carries the blue and black Cerachrom bezel that the market named Batman when it came on the Oyster bracelet. Fitted to the Jubilee, as this one is, the same watch answers to Batgirl instead — the only difference between the two nicknames is five-link bracelet versus three, which tells you something about how collectors actually think. The mechanism underneath is better than the nicknames suggest. A fourth hand tracks a second time zone on the 24-hour scale, and the local hour hand is set independently in one-hour jumps, so you land, move the hour hand and the minutes and seconds never stop. Rotate the bidirectional bezel against the 24-hour hand and you have read a third zone off a watch that only displays two. The bezel insert is worth its own sentence. Two colours in one piece of ceramic is a genuinely difficult thing to fire, because the blue and the black shrink differently, and Rolex arrives at it by treating part of a finished blue insert rather than joining two halves. There is no seam to find. Calibre 3285, self-winding, approximately 70 hours of power reserve, waterproof to 100 metres. The case is 40 mm in Oystersteel, on the Jubilee bracelet with an O…