What is a tropical dial? It is a term that means different things to different people. To an unscrupulous dealer with a watch with a damaged dial, it represents an opportunity to represent that dial as something exotic and desirable. Also, lets not forget the possibility of adding a healthy price premium to a watch that has an tropical dial. As Edmond put it so well, when one hears a watch described as having a tropical dial, it is like a “big red warning light” that means you need to proceed with extreme caution. Edmond, you are correct. For a topic that is so subjective and open to interpretation, defining what is tropical and what is not is always going to be open to abuse. It is with this in mind that I thought it would be useful to compile a photographic diary, if one likes, of various watches that do appear to have genuinely uncontested tropical dials. Such a view will always be a democratic one….if a sizeable enough body of views disagrees with my photographic compendium or if new examples come to light, the article will be edited and adjusted to take account of such new information. My starting point, then, is providing a framework from which to judge. Marcello provided an initial checklist. A dial is tropical when
1) It has faded naturally to a different colour. Note that the fade is often from black to brown, but can be from any original colour so long as a material change in colour is evident. Also note that the change must be brought about “naturally”. This can be through exposure to the sun, natural ageing or indeed any other natural process. Baking it in an over most definitely does not count as natural.
2) A tropical dial needs to be almost uniform in its fading. Sometimes a watch dial gets only partial exposure to the sun and this results in a clear fade but only to some parts of the watch. To be a pure tropical dial, the fading should be uniformly and evenly spread across the whole dial.
3) The change in colour should NOT be due to water (or other) damage. This is not to say that various types of damage can create very unusual dial outcomes - indeed, often attractive - but this would not be considered a tropical effect.
These are simple rules and by no means cast in iron. However, by adopting such a simplified methodology, one gets a fairly clear picture of what is and what is not a good tropical dial.
Many dials were sent in to my original post. My apologies to those that do not appear in the following compendium. I have tried to select those dials that appear to tick the boxes above most clearly.
First off, the Sea-Dweller 1665. As the sun moves across the dial from left to right, the tropical nature of the dial unveils itself. Unquestionably brown and uniform. A superb example of a tropical dial.