During the 1980s, Rolex began to adorn their sports watches with precious gemstones for its most exclusive and demanding clientele. Among these first early gem-set sports watches are the manually-wound Daytona references 6269 and 6270 (the former with brilliant-cut diamonds at the bezel and the latter with baguette-cut diamonds) and the GMT-Master reference 16758 "SARU" set with rubies, diamonds, and sapphires. In the late 1990s through the 2000s, Rolex specifically utilized the ultimate luxury tool watch, the Cosmograph Daytona, as a vehicle for gemological experimentation. Examples with large baguette-set bezels, pavé diamond dials, emeralds, rubies or sapphires to name a few combinations have been produced, always in very small quantities and with extreme attention to quality and execution.

Set with 36 rainbow-hued sapphires, 56 diamonds adorning the lugs and crown guards, and diamonds indicating the hours, to call the Rainbow Daytona luxurious and lavish is an exercise in understatement. Each sapphire – every single gemstone used is internally flawless - is perfectly cut to fit without prongs into the bezel, and selected with the right color for transitioning to the stones on adjacent sides, so that rather than seeming like 36 individual stones, they blend into one another. Due to the difficulty in sourcing these stones, subjecting them to Rolex’s high standards, and then fitting them into the watch, production numbers remain extremely low and only a handful have surfaced at auction.

The now-discontinued yellow gold model was quickly followed by a white gold variation, also discontinued, and then, unexpectedly, earlier this year (2018) Rolex surprised the community at Baselworld by introducing a version cased in Everose, sparking new passions (and likely inflaming old desires) for this most exclusive of Daytonas. To behold the exceptionally created Rainbow Daytona is second only to owning it. The present lot is in excellent and complete, making it an opportunity to own what has become a legendary wristwatch, not just among Rolexes but all wristwatches.