Designing a watch bezel sounds fairly straightforward.
Choose a colour. Make a sample. Approve it.
Unfortunately, watch people make it considerably more difficult than that.
And we mean that affectionately.
Watch people really, really care about colour
If you've spent enough time around Rolex collectors, you'll know exactly what we mean.
Take the Submariner Kermit. Different production periods, different bezel inserts and subtly different shades of green can become topics of considerable discussion - and, ultimately, collectability.
To most people, they're green.
To watch people, they're absolutely not the same green.
That attention to detail is part of what makes watches interesting. But when you're actually trying to design a bezel, it's both a blessing and a curse.
Because there often isn't one objectively "correct" shade.
People notice tiny differences - and they have strong preferences about them.
And then there's aluminium
This gets even more complicated when we're designing aluminium bezels.
Ceramic has its own challenges, but aluminium - particularly when you're deliberately trying to achieve a richer, slightly glossy or flecked finish like the bezel of the Black Bay 58 GMT - interacts beautifully with light.
And inconveniently with cameras.
An aluminium bezel isn't really one colour.
The same bezel can look substantially different outside on a bright summer afternoon, under an overcast sky, beside a window, beneath warm indoor lighting or under photography lights.
That's part of its appeal.
But it's also something that's surprisingly difficult to communicate online.
Photographing bezels is a nightmare
We can take ten photographs of the same bezel and end up with ten slightly different representations of its colour.
Put it under bright studio lighting because you want to give somebody a clean, accurate product photograph and the lighting itself can change how the surface appears.
Take it outside and you're now dependent on the sunlight available that day - and, being based in the UK, we're not exactly blessed with predictable quantities of it.
Then there's the camera, processing and ultimately the screen you're viewing the photograph on.
This is why we're sometimes cautious about describing a bezel as exactly a particular shade.
The photograph is one moment.
The bezel exists in changing light.
And actually, we think that's one of the best things about aluminium.
Our Afterburner is a good example
Our Afterburner bezel for the Tudor Black Bay 58 GMT is our interpretation of the classic blue-and-red Pepsi combination.
It's also one of our favourite bezels we've ever produced and, irritatingly for us, almost permanently sold out.
But when we developed Fuchsia Horizon, we wanted to do something rather different.
We didn't simply want to make Afterburner pinker.
We wanted a bezel whose character genuinely changed depending on where you were wearing it.
And getting that right took experimentation.
Fuchsia Horizon isn't really fuchsia. Except when it is.
This is what makes Horizon difficult to photograph - and exactly why we chose the final version.
In some lighting, you could almost mistake it for a conventional Pepsi bezel.
Move into different light and the red becomes noticeably deeper and richer, while the blue begins moving towards a dark navy.
Then the light catches it differently again.
Suddenly the fuchsia comes alive and can appear almost bright pink.
The blue does something similar. Most of the time it's considerably deeper than a conventional Pepsi blue - almost navy - but catch it at the right angle and it becomes this extraordinarily rich sea blue.
Against the gilt gold numerals, it's one of our favourite combinations we've made.
And then you move your wrist again.
It changes.
That's the point
We tried different versions of Fuchsia Horizon before settling on this one.
The final decision wasn't based on which sample looked best sitting underneath a photography lamp.
It was based on range.
We wanted the darker, more restrained character. We wanted the flashes of pink. We wanted the deep navy. We wanted that moment where the blue suddenly comes alive.
Most importantly, we wanted all of them in the same bezel.
Because one of the things we increasingly think about when designing at Steel Reef is not simply:
What colour is this bezel?
It's:
What colours can this bezel become?
You're designing something that moves
A watch isn't viewed like a painting.
It's attached to your wrist.
It's constantly changing angle relative to you, the sky, the room and every light source around you.
So when we develop a bezel, we don't think the objective should always be to produce a perfectly flat, consistent colour under every condition.
Sometimes that's exactly what you want.
But sometimes the more interesting design is the one that gives you something different when you move your wrist.
That's especially true with aluminium.
The difficulty is that we can photograph that bezel all day and still never completely show you what it's going to look like.
You'll have to take it outside.
Preferably somewhere sunnier than Nottingham.
Find the one that changes for you
Every bezel in our range has been through the same process: endless samples, far too many photographs and a lot of arguing about shades of blue. If you'd like to see where that's led,
