There is a 2021 Rolex Submariner in olive green — reference 126610LV, known informally as the Starbucks — that currently trades on the secondary market for approximately $28,000. Its retail price is $10,700. That gap, which is absurd by any normal consumer-goods logic, is the result of a combination of Rolex's production discipline and the watch market's particular relationship with color. The olive dial did not create the premium. The market's collective decision that olive was correct created the premium, and the dial happened to be green when that decision was made.
This is how taste works in watches, which is to say: slowly, then all at once, then expensively, then incorrectly, then, eventually, correctly again.
Between roughly 2020 and 2023, the watch industry experienced what can only be described as a green dial moment. Rolex offered it. Patek Philippe offered it. Audemars Piguet — whose Royal Oak in green is among the more successful versions of a watch that does not need improvement — offered it. Tudor offered it. Omega, IWC, Longines, Breitling, Zenith, TAG Heuer, and approximately forty other manufacturers all introduced dials in shades ranging from deep forest to pale sage to something that a Pantone catalog would describe as Jade and a collector would describe as an error.
The green dial had gone from a mark of distinction to a production checklist item. This is the precise moment at which a taste becomes a trend — and the precise moment at which people with taste begin to move elsewhere.
The Origin Story That Everyone Gets Wrong
The conventional account of the green dial moment points to the Rolex Submariner's history with green — the Hulk, the Kermit, the Starbucks — as evidence that green was always latent in the market, waiting to be activated. This is partially true and mostly misleading. Rolex's green dials were not experiments in trend-chasing. They were specific engineering and aesthetic decisions made for specific models at specific moments, each with a logic that had nothing to do with what other brands were doing.
The more accurate origin of the 2021–2023 moment is the secondary market. The Rolex Submariner in green, in all its variants, was fetching substantial premiums well before the green dial moment began. Collectors were paying over retail — sometimes dramatically over — for a green Submariner while ignoring blue and black versions of the same reference. The industry, reading that signal in the way industries tend to read market signals, concluded that green was what people wanted.
"The industry heard 'green' and missed the sentence. What collectors were saying was 'scarcity plus restraint plus a specific Rolex.' Green was incidental."
The result of misreading the signal was a remarkable proliferation of green dials that ranged from genuinely excellent — the AP Royal Oak in deep green remains one of the finest executions of that case — to contractually obligatory. There were brands releasing green dials because every other brand had released a green dial, which is the definition of trend-following rather than taste-making, and which produces objects that will age the way trend-following objects always age: badly, and faster than expected.
What Distinguishes a Good Green from a Bad One
The question of whether a green dial works is not actually a question about green. It is a question about whether the color serves the object or whether the object is serving the color. These are different relationships with different outcomes.
Consider the AP Royal Oak in Kaki green, introduced in 2022. The case is steel. The bracelet is integrated. The dial is a deep, warm green that reads as almost brown in certain light — the color of old military canvas rather than the color of an emerald. Against the brushed and polished surfaces of the Royal Oak's distinctive octagonal bezel, the dial creates a tension that is resolved by the overall geometry of the watch. The green is doing something. It is not merely there.
Compare this to a Breitling Navitimer from the same period in a bright, saturated green — a color chosen, one suspects, because green was selling rather than because the Navitimer's design had anything to say in green. The watch is not improved by the color. The color is not illuminated by the watch. They exist in a kind of mutual indifference that is the hallmark of a trend decision rather than a design decision.
A collector with experience — the kind of experience that comes from handling several hundred watches and making a dozen expensive mistakes before developing the patience to wait for the right one — learns to read this distinction quickly. It is in the relationship between surface finishes and dial texture. It is in whether the color appears considered or appended. It is in whether removing the color would leave you with an excellent watch or merely a watch.
Where the Market Is Now, and What Comes Next
The secondary market for green dials has cooled substantially from its 2022 peak. The Rolex Hulk, which was trading at extraordinary premiums before being discontinued, has come down. The Starbucks remains elevated but less dramatically than it was eighteen months ago. Several brands have quietly discontinued green variants that were not moving as expected.
This is not a failure of green. It is the correct outcome. The watches that deserved to hold their value have held their value. The watches that were green because green was in style are being repriced by a market that is, ultimately, quite good at determining what has intrinsic worth versus what has borrowed momentum.
The next color that serious collectors will converge on — and this process is already underway — will not be announced. It will not be the subject of a press release. It will emerge from a handful of references, in a handful of brands, where a specific color happens to work particularly well for reasons that have everything to do with that specific object and nothing to do with whatever anyone else is doing. A few people will notice. Then more will notice. Then the industry will notice and begin issuing press releases.
At which point the taste will have, once again, become a trend — and people who understood it first will have moved on to something else entirely.
