Looking for a gold Rolex? Check out the gold Date.

Recently Zach Weiss, co-founder of Worn&Wound, wrote an opinion piece on his growing attraction to yellow gold watches. Gold watches are great looking in general in my opinion, but can be perceived as awfully showy. In the world of yellow gold Rolex watches, we’ve found a few models that are relatively affordable in the context of the current market of ultra-inflated prices for steel sport models. 

While a “Hulk” Submariner is selling for over $20K, an all-gold Rolex Date (the 34mm variant of the Datejust) goes for under $10K on the secondhand market, making it a potentially smart choice for the right buyer.

Photo by Keep the Time

Bob’s Watches, a good reference point for the secondhand market, has a few gold Date models available. Of course a 34mm watch may be too small for men with larger wrists, but one a bracelet the somewhat diminutive size works for a lot of people. Sometimes smaller (or bigger) watches require a visual adjustment period but tend to look very normal for a gentleman’s watch size after some time on the wrist.

Photo by Greis Jewelers

Of course, being all-gold the Rolex Date has a high degree of wrist presence and that’s exactly what you are going for if you are getting into a gold Rolex. Besides, yellow gold, in general, has a warmth that cannot be conveyed by other metals.

Hodinkee’s Jack Forstner received a gold Rolex Day-Date from the online magazine’s founder Ben Clymer for writing 1,000 stories. He described his gold Day-Date as “kind of absurd. It's just so much. I guess it says something about me that the fact that it has appeared in films as the watch of a cold-blooded, ruthless criminal mastermind (Keyser Soze in The Usual Suspects) and on the wrists of countless mid-level caporegimes of certain fraternal businessmen's associations, was part of the attraction. But the heart has its reasons whereof reason knows nothing: I still wanted one.”

Actually a gold Day-Date isn’t as out-of-reach as one might think. Bob’s Watches has them for around the $20K mark, which of course is still a lot of money, but it’s not too bad considering the value of gold itself. 

Here at the Everest Journal we have been trying to show our readers that if you search hard enough you can get some pretty cool Rolex models in spite of the supply shortage for new models. Part of the fun of watch collecting is the hunt. Go try on some 34mm Rolex models. You can find some excellent example\s if you are willing to give smaller watches a go since they may not be as popular as the 39-42mm Rolex sport models available now.