The hardest choice with a luxury watch is often the simplest one: steel or gold? Steel is cool, tough and understated; gold is warm, rich and precious. This Datejust refuses to choose, and that refusal is the heart of its charm. It is made of both, steel and rose gold married together down the case and bracelet, and Rolex thinks so highly of that combination that it gave it a name of its own: Rolesor. For the woman who wants the everyday ease of steel and the warmth of gold at once, this is the answer, and it is one Rolex has been perfecting for the best part of a century.
Rolesor, the word Rolex coined by joining its own name to the French for gold, is the deliberate pairing of stainless steel and gold in a single watch, a signature the brand has used since the 1930s. Here it takes its loveliest modern form: the bezel, the winding crown and the centre links of the bracelet are rose gold, while the case and the outer bracelet links are steel, so a warm pink ribbon runs down the middle of a cooler steel band. The two metals set each other off beautifully, the gold glowing against the steel, giving the watch a richness that all-steel lacks and a wearability that all-gold can feel too precious for. It is the best of both worlds on the wrist, dressy and practical in the same breath.
The gold itself is special, too, because it is Rolex's own Everose. Ordinary rose gold can slowly fade, its warm pink tone drifting over the years, so Rolex developed its own patented pink gold alloy, blended with a touch of platinum, that holds its colour permanently. The rose gold on this watch will glow exactly as warmly in decades to come as it does today, which matters on a watch meant to be worn for a lifetime and passed on.
The rose gold is shaped, at the bezel, into one of Rolex's most recognisable signatures: the fluted bezel. Those crisp, gleaming flutes began life as a practical feature, a way of screwing the bezel tightly onto the case to help seal the watch, but they long ago became pure ornament, a ring of finely cut facets that catches the light with every movement and frames the dial like a crown. In rose gold, the fluting sparkles, lending the watch a dressy, jewel-like brilliance.
The dial it frames is quietly gorgeous. It is a soft silver, finished with a delicate sunray that brightens and shifts as the light moves across it, and in place of numerals it carries ten diamonds set as the hour markers, each one twinkling in its own little setting around the dial. The effect is understated but unmistakably luxurious, the diamonds catching the light against the silver, the rose gold hands sweeping over them, a date sitting at three beneath the little Cyclops lens on the crystal that magnifies it for easy reading. It is a face that reads as elegant first and sparkling second, exactly the balance a great jewellery watch should strike.
It rides on the Jubilee bracelet, and that is a lovely, fitting detail, because the Jubilee was created by Rolex in 1945 especially for the launch of the very first Datejust. Its five-piece links are supple and dressy, draping softly around the wrist and catching the light in the rose gold centre row, more refined and more feminine than the sportier Oyster bracelet, and they suit this elegant two-tone watch perfectly.
At thirty-one millimetres it is the mid-size Datejust, poised neatly between the smaller ladies' models and the classic thirty-six, a size that wears with presence without ever looking large, modern and versatile on a woman's wrist. And for all its elegance it is a Rolex to the core, built on the waterproof Oyster case with its screw-down crown, running on a self-winding movement certified to Rolex's Superlative Chronometer standard, accurate and robust and engineered to run faithfully for decades of daily wear. The date clicks over crisply at midnight, the complication that gave the Datejust its name when, in 1945, it became the first self-winding waterproof wristwatch to show the date in a window, an idea so useful the whole industry followed.
That is what makes this Datejust 31 so appealing. It gathers the best of everything Rolex does into one elegant watch: the clever two-tone Rolesor marriage of cool steel and warm, fade-proof Everose gold, the sparkling fluted bezel, a silver sunray dial lit by ten diamonds, and the supple, dressy Jubilee bracelet created for the Datejust's very first model. Mid-sized and endlessly wearable, built to the same uncompromising standard as every Rolex, it is a jewellery watch and an everyday watch at once, and it carries that easy, two-tone elegance with all the quiet confidence of the crown.
