How to Make a Nice Watch Iconic: Order Up a Salmon Dial

When the biggest players in the watch world look to fashion a special-edition timepiece that will be highly sought after and remembered for ages, they all go for this coveted dial.

- CAM WOLF

A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, the team at the Swiss luxury watchmaker H. Moser & Cie. was fiddling around with ideas to make its Streamliner watch "iconic." That's the word the company's CEO, Edouard Meylan, used on a recent call. The watch's dial already came in a bright emerald, but Meylan wanted something less showy and more classic for the next iteration of the $21,900 flagship design. The team at Moser played with champagne and gray but eventually arrived at the same place nearly every watch brand in 2023 has when it wants to make something more than just special but iconic: salmon.

Since prominent brands including Rolex and Jaeger-LeCoultre started deploying salmon dials almost a century ago, the shade has been used to turn baseline models into extremely special ones. Salmon won out by being just different enough: neither black nor white but a unique prize for the rarest editions. It's nearly golden without conjuring images of '80s excess-there's a reason makers initially paired salmon almost exclusively with rose gold cases, or that Patek Philippe calls its truest salmon shade "golden opaline."