The most consequential watch part I ever bought was a thin ring of green aluminum.
It was a genuine bezel insert for a Rolex Submariner ref. 16610LV, except the watch waiting for it was a black-bezel 16610LN. At 16, this struck me as an elegant solution. I loved my first Rolex, wanted a Kermit, and did not want to part with one to acquire the other. Change the insert, keep the attachment, enjoy the color. Every component was genuine.
The logic was not.
Once fitted, the watch looked closer to what I wanted and somehow felt further from it. The problem was no longer color. It was an identity. My Submariner had acquired the Kermit’s most obvious feature without becoming a Kermit, and I had acquired just enough knowledge to care.
That bezel taught me what the watch-collecting rabbit hole actually is. It is not simply the accumulation of watches, but the accumulation of distinctions. Once those distinctions become visible, ownership turns into comparison.
Before reference numbers, a watch could simply be beautiful. My first luxury watch was an 18-karat rose-gold Baume & Mercier Classima with a sunburst guilloché dial. I was 16 and lacked the vocabulary to assess its execution or place it within a hierarchy. The dial mesmerized me, the gold felt precious, and that was enough.
This was not necessarily a purer form of appreciation. It was merely less organized. I saw the watch in front of me without also seeing every alternative arranged beside it.
The Classima taught me to admire watches. The Submariner taught me to compare them.
My first Rolex was a thoroughly beaten-up Submariner ref. 16610LN, a Z-series example with no box or papers. It cost around US$4,000, which requires some explanation when the buyer is a high school sophomore. I was an international student with extremely generous parents and a monthly alliance of roughly US$3,000. This was a privilege, not a teenage masterclass in finance. I saved for a while, spent nearly everything at once, and lived on ramen and dining-hall food for the next few months.
Honestly, those were good months.
I would like to say I chose the Submariner after a sophisticated assessment of its design, history, and credentials as a professional dive watch. In reality, the Rolex name mattered. It represented status and success, while I was a normal 16-year-old who had achieved neither. I had homework. But I also had a Rolex.
The attachment that followed became more personal than the status it projected. Battered and incomplete, the watch felt intensely mine. At first, it was simply my Submariner.
Then I discovered the green one.
The ref. 16610LV, better known as the “Kermit,” was not a limited edition, but it was considered rarer and more collectible than the regular black model. Its maxi dial had larger hour markers, while its aluminum bezel insert was green rather than black. The changes were modest. Their effect on my satisfaction was not.
Before encountering the LV, I owned a Submariner. Afterward, I owned the regular Submariner. The watch itself had not changed; its position had. Mine was now a 16610LN, sitting below a 16610LV that appeared more distinctive, more desirable, and somehow more complete. A single letter had rearranged the hierarchy in my head.
Knowledge did not make my Rolex worse. It made the alternative impossible to ignore.
That was why the bezel modification could never work. As a design solution, it did. The green gave the watch exactly the playfulness I thought the all-black version lacked. As a collector’s solution, it failed completely. The watch still lacked the LV’s maxi dial and remained a 16610LN. Both the watch and the insert were genuine; it was their relationship that was wrong.
From across the room, close enough. Inside my head, not even close.
I had thought I wanted a green bezel. What I wanted was an LV.
This distinction sounds ridiculous outside watch collecting, and perhaps it should. Yet it exposes the difference between liking a design and wanting a reference. Collectors do not respond only to appearance. We care about originality, factory configuration, and the biography of an object—qualities that may be invisible on the wrist but still shape how we see it.
Reference numbers appear to be neutral cataloging tools. In practice, they preserve decisions about which components belong together, while also teaching us where one object ends and another begins. They can clarify taste, but they can also dictate it. At 16, I had learned enough to recognize the hierarchy without knowing how to separate that hierarchy from my own judgment.
I eventually sold the 16610LN to fund another watch. My appetite had expanded faster than my budget, particularly as luxury-watch prices rose and collecting became more popular. I regret the decision now, although hindsight operates with an imaginary bank account. At the time, selling one watch was the only realistic way to experience another.
Picture, Monochrome
You can buy the same reference again. You cannot buy back your first one.
When I finally bought a genuine 16610LV in 2022, the reasons I valued it had changed. After 15 years of collecting and experience with almost every modern Rolex model, rarity no longer carried the argument. The design did.
The green aluminum bezel softens the seriousness of the familiar Submariner, while the maxi dial gives it greater presence without making it louder. Its 40mm case, slimmer neo-vintage lugs, and close-fitting Oyster bracelet sit naturally on my 6.9-inch wrist. Modern Rolex watches feel more robust, and their clasps and micro-adjustment systems are easier to live with. They are better engineered. I am not convinced they are always better drawn.
The Kermit still looks like a tool watch that happened to put on bright green sneakers. The irony is that the details I once valued as signs of rarity are now the details I value for their restraint. At 16, I wanted the more collectible Submariner. At 31, I prefer the better-resolved one.
It would be easy to conclude that collector knowledge corrupted the uncomplicated fascination I felt for the Classima. That would be too simple. Knowledge created the comparison between the LN and LV, but it also allowed me to move beyond collectibility and understand why the Kermit works on its own merits. The danger was never learning more. It was allowing what I learned to tell me what I should want.
The genuine LV may be the better-resolved design, but it cannot replace the battered LN. Another Z-series 16610LN would occupy the same position in the Rolex catalog, yet it would not be the watch I wore through high school—the one bought with an excessive allowance and paid for, in my own small way, with months of ramen.
A reference number can explain why one watch differs from another. It cannot tell me which one will matter.
I thought I was changing a Submariner when I fitted that green bezel. The more lasting change ran in the opposite direction: my Rolex became an LN, the green one became an LV, and I became someone for whom a single letter could unsettle an otherwise complete object.
I eventually bought the right reference. The wrong one remains the Rolex I miss.
- Jason
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About the Author:
Jason Lee is a watch journalist and collector based in Seoul whose work has appeared in Time+Tide, SJX Watches and WatchTime. Drawing on 15 years of collecting, he explores how watches shape—and become part of—our personal histories.