The Rolex 'King Midas' touch: Why the world's richest are going all-in on yellow gold watches

“You see this watch? You see this watch I’m wearing?” asks the cocksure salesman, played by Alec Baldwin, of his underlings in David Mamet’s film Glengarry Glen Ross. “This watch costs more than your car”. It’s a Rolex Oyster Perpetual Day-Date.

Critical to the brag, however, is that it’s in yellow gold.

Cinema provides plenty of examples of the gold watch as archetypical symbol of having arrived. Michael Douglas wears a gold Cartier Santos as Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. The gold watch is even used a totem of the growing wealth of stockbroker Jordan Belfort as played by Leonardo DiCaprio, as he progresses through the story of The Wolf of Wall Street: from steel Seiko Solar to gold-plated Tag Heuer Series 1000 to solid gold Tag Heuer Series 2000.

And yet it’s a gold watch - a big, shiny, fake one - that Del Boy also dons in Only Fools and Horses.

And that’s the problem with the gold watch - and especially one in yellow gold, rather than more subtle red, rose or pink golds: it is simultaneously classic and flashy, timeless and yet of questionable taste, shiny but maybe also suspect.

Landmark timepieces

The gold watch has traditionally been given for landmark birthdays, or on retirement - a tradition said to have been started by Pepsi Co. in the 1940s - or to mark a special achievement. Einstein, for example, was given a yellow gold Longines by the Zionist convention in Los Angeles in 1931. Every new US President is been sent a gold Date-Just, a tradition that started when Rolex sent one to soon-to-be President Dwight Eisenhower in 1951.

But the gold watch has also been the go-to choice of someone who wants to tell you how much money they have.

That connection between wrist candy and flexing can be attributed to a few things. In the 1960s a style revolution saw men dress more casually - the watch consequently became more important as a signifier of wealth, and nothing did that faster and more obviously that a watch in yellow gold.

And then, early in the same decade, Rolex effectively reinvented the idea of the gold watch by creating one that was so obscenely golden, it broke that historic association between the metal and marking an important moment in one’s lifetime. Instead it just said: ‘Here’s a big lump of gold. I have it on my wrist. You don’t’.

Not for nothing was the watch, designed by the esteemed watch designer Gerald Genta, called the King Midas - named after the mythical Greek king, cursed so that everything he touched turned to gold (be careful what you wish for). At the time it was the heaviest solid gold watch ever made. Naturally Elvis Presley wore one, but also John Wayne. The villain Scaramanga in The Man With the Golden Gun was also The Man With the Golden Watch - a King Midas.

Circumstances only reinforced Rolex’s proposition that statement gold was top boss. The subsequent two decades would see a steady rise in gold prices - peaking throughout the “greed is good” era of the 1980s - arguably creating the template for the gold watch as a status symbol which has remained more or less dominant ever since.

The step up from steel

Now, with gold prices not just at a record high, but at an all-time high - as high-rollers seek to move their money out of the less secure assets - perhaps this is more than ever the case. In fact, because the precious metal is especially precious, there’s only a few watchmakers with access to the special processes required to work with gold precisely - to absolutely minimise wastage, which literally means hoovering up the gold dust - and the capital to buy the gold in the first place.

“Making a model in gold is above all a matter of finance - you need to have the money up front, the millions you need for the funds of gold required, and that’s a barrier to entry to making a watch in gold for many brands,” explains Edouard Meylan, the CEO of watch brand H. Moser & Cie.

“You’re taking a bet not just on the success of the model you’re making in gold, but on the future value of the gold itself too”.

Some watchmakers - like the independent maker Gronefeld - refuse to use yellow gold because it’s too show-offy. But that hasn’t stopped a number of watch brands recently pushing yellow gold back to the top: Chopard, Vacheron Constantin, Fears, Nomos Glashutte, Breitling, Longines, Piaget and Rolex of course, all have made big splashes with gold.

And, with steel sports watches now commanding record high prices too - that, to repeat, is watches made of a commonplace alloy - watch fans are starting to think, ‘heck, may as well go the extra and buy a gold watch’, knowing that the metal alone means the timepiece will likely increase in value.

Remarkably, 50 years ago a solid gold Rolex Submariner would cost you eight times the steel equivalent. Now it’s just four.

As George Bamford, of Bamford Watches, puts it, we’ve had years of rose gold - and that has proven a kind of gateway drug for a return of its gaudier cousin.

“But other than that it's very hard to explain gold’s allure,” he says - it’s just something you feel rather than think.

“For all of the status-signalling, it is a remarkably expressive material, in its play with light, in its various shades, its weight and softness - such that I think even scratches enhance its appeal”.

All that hints at another road in watchmaking to make gold even more special - and that’s to develop your own kind of even more exclusive gold.

Omega, A. Lange & Sohne, Chanel, Hublot and Rolex are all watchmakers that have either developed a signature colour of gold - a touch more red or more honey-coloured than is usual, for example - or their own proprietary techno-gold, promising the desirable look but made scratch-proof or colour-stabilised. It’s gold but a 21st century version.

To bring such advances about, Rolex even has its own gold furnace. Now that’s commitment to the yellow stuff.

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