The Review I Said I'd Never Write
An owner's take on the Rolex Titanium Yacht-Master 42
I don’t like doing watch reviews. Most watch reviews are, to be blunt, spec sheets riddled with adjectives. You get the diameter, the movement, the water resistance, and a handful of sentences praising the interplay of light on the dial before being told it retails for X amount. Useful? I guess. Interesting? Hardly ever.
Jack Forster recently wrote a sharp post about this exact problem, riffing off a camera reviewer’s observation that truly ‘objective’ reviews are both impossible and undesirable. His point, which I think is bang on, is that readers don’t actually want objectivity; they want honesty. People want to know what a watch feels like to live with, from someone who isn’t being paid to tell them it’s wonderful (or sh1t!).
Forster illustrated this with a hypothetical ‘objective’ (and hilarious) theatre review that reads like a spec sheet – seat count, stage dimensions, the height of the actors in metres – and the comparison to typical watch coverage was, well, a little too close for comfort. His conclusion was that the real question a reviewer should be asking is “What kind of watch is this watch trying to be, and how well does it succeed?”
That resonated with me, because when my friend Mr Rehaut wrote his guest post on SDC last year, he answered that question extremely well from a first-owner’s perspective. He described a watch that was trying to be the antithesis of everything you might expect from Rolex, and succeeding at it completely. What he didn’t cover – because he couldn’t, at that stage – was what it’s like to live with the thing, day after day, for months.
I can now cover that part, so here we are. The review I said I’d never write.
Estimated reading time: ~12 minutes
How it happened
I should declare my biases up front… that’s what honest reviewers do, right? First, Mr Rehaut is a friend, and his writing made me want this watch before I’d ever held one in my own hands. Plus, the steady drip of wrist shots on his Instagram feed kept my desire simmering for the better part of a year.
I mention this because desire is rarely rational and the source of desire matters even more. If someone you trust and respect loves something, it is kinda hard to separate their enthusiasm from the object itself. Second, I was already deep into a ‘titanium phase’ thanks to my C6 from Romain Gauthier which I wrote about before. The C6 had converted me to the gospel of lightweight watches, and the idea of Rolex delivering their own interpretation of that experience felt hard to ignore.
I should also mention I have no relationship with any Rolex AD. Despite owning several ‘Rolices’1, I had close to zero chance of getting allocated a TYM through normal retail channels. So I did what any reasonable collector does when conventional routes are closed… I threw a Hail Mary into a buy/sell WhatsApp group and said I wanted one - even at a premium. For context, I recently went into Watches of Switzerland on Oxford Street to adjust the bracelet. The sales assistant was surprised to see this watch, and told me she had only seen one other in ~18 months; just a data point on how uncommon these are.
My friend Ike – the same friend who’d let me try his TYM months earlier, on the day he picked it up – reached out to me privately. He’d only worn the watch about three times since buying it, and had no interest in keeping it. He generously offered to sell his watch to me at cost.
I remain grateful, and even though he didn’t ask, I made a gentleman’s agreement with him that if I ever decided to move it on, he’d get first refusal – at cost, obviously.
As I’ve written before in my Watch Collecting Etiquette essays, principles matter. Ike has more money than the governments of many small countries, so I doubt this arrangement will ever be consequential to him financially. The point was never about the money, though. It was mainly about demonstrating that the favour was received in the spirit it was given. Pay it forward if you can; it tends to come back in spades.
In case it wasn’t clear from my retelling above, I ended up buying the very first TYM I tried on - I just had a ~9 month gap between it first landing on my wrist and owning it. It’s a small story, but it is my story… and as watch nerds I am sure you can appreciate the delightful serendipity of it all.
First impressions
The first time I held Ike’s TYM in person I was struck by two things - the weight, and the colour. The weight is legitimately baffling; if you’ve ever handled a standard Submariner or GMT and then immediately picked up the TYM, your brain malfunctions for a second. It feels like someone has replaced the internals with air. Mr Rehaut covered the technical side in his post (the ~45% density reduction of titanium versus 904L steel) but statistics fail to capture the visceral surprise. You know it’s going to be light, you’ve read the reviews and what have you... but your hand/brain still doesn’t quite believe it.
The colour is harder to describe and, I think, harder to appreciate from photos. In person, the TYM is not ‘dark grey’ in the way a charcoal suit is dark grey. It’s more like a kind of industrial matte that shifts between tones depending on the light; sometimes almost gunmetal, sometimes closer to slate, and under certain indoor lighting, a somewhat drab battleship grey. Mr Rehaut touched on this too – under standard yellow indoor lights, the brushed titanium can look a bit dull, almost cheap.
My brother-in-law, who knows very little about watches, commented on how slick the matte tones looked, and my 10-year-old son said the matte bezel reminded him of “Batman’s body armour.” I think my son might be the ideal reviewer for this watch. Batman’s body armour is probably the most accurate description anyone has offered.
Daily life
I’ve been wearing this watch exclusively for nearly two months now. Two months of daily wear teaches you things that an afternoon at an AD or a weekend at a GTG will never teach you.