Green Dials Are Dead: This is Next

Tim Mosso talks about the end of the green dial watch fad of the early 2020s. From the 2020 model year Rolex Oyster Perpetual collection to elite Patek Philippe complicated watches, green dials have been everywhere for the last five years. But 2025 is different, and there's a changing of the guard in the world or watch design. The future belongs to "glassbox" sapphire crystals as watch collectors search for the latest trend. Giant crystals on watches aren't new - huge Plexiglas crystals on 1950s and 1960s divers were functionally thick. And the year 2000's Corum Bubble mimicked - in jest - the huge plexi of the Rolex Deepsea Special that bottomed on the Challenger Deep. But the Corum was a goofy riff on history, not a functional choice of any kind -- and it was too far ahead of its time. By 2016, the term "glassbox" or "glass box" had emerged as a marker for stylishly over-cambered sapphire crystals with bubble-like distortion. The 2023 TAG Heuer Carrera 60th Anniversary seems to have been the moment our current glassbox crystal era began in earnest. TAG Heuer went a step further by contouring the dial to match the curvature of the crystal. The next year, Jaeger-LeCoultre (Duometre) and IWC (Portuguese) dramatically turned to the glassbox with redesigned versions of long-running watch models. Girard Perregaux, Czapek, and even Raymond Weil followed suit. Easily the most consequential was the IWC Portugieser Eternal Calendar. Although theoretically a mechanical upgrade on t