An issue that some of you have faced once with your own watches (due to computer or mobile phone magnetism for example). But when it comes to working in such conditions all day long, an antimagnetic watch is clearly a necessity. A simple solution is to house the movement in a faraday cage, a protective enclosure formed by a conducting material, usually soft iron.
As quick as the enthusiasm exploded, it faded away again. The reason for that was that Rolex decided to make their most desirable novelty in decades, in WHITE GOLD. Now usually the metal of a new timepiece is a journalistic jotting. Nevertheless, when a watch is on our personal shopping-list that becomes an important factor and all journalistic ‘neutrality’ vanishes. Suspense… YES… a Pepsi!
The new ‘Pepsi’ does look very good, and it actually looks exactly as we hoped it would look like.
The Oyster Perpetual GMT-Master II has been our favourite “multi-purpose” travel watch for a long time. Nevertheless, apart from the faraday cage and the antimagnetic capacity, the main differences were a honeycomb textured black dial, alpha hands (instead of the ‘Mercedes hands’), specific triangular indexes at 3-6-9 and a unique ‘lightning’ hand for the seconds, just to remind you of the purpose of the best replica watches.
The white gold Rolex GMT-Master II Pepsi has a 20k Euro higher price tag than the GMT-Master II 116710 BLNR that was introduced last year. We started to realize that we’ll have to put coins in our piggy bank for many more years, and we won’t be able to buy the new Pepsi for ‘that life-changing event’ later this year. Just thinking of these qualifications, the only options that come to mind (and I hope you’ll forgive me for the ones I forget) are the Jaeger-LeCoultre Master Compressor Geographic, the Girard-Perregaux Traveller WW.TC, Patek Philippe’s Aquanaut Travel Time and the new Nautilus Travel Time Chronograph and the Seamaster Planet Ocean GMT that Omega introduced last year.
What we hadn’t realized is that innovating a blue/red bezel was kind of difficult. And that was the reason that Rolex hadn’t created the ‘Pepsi’ in Cerachrom before. The main difference with the previous generations of GMT-Master is the antimagnetic construction: if the old models were based on a soft iron enclosure to protect the movement, the new one opts for an antimagnetic hairspring (the blue Parachrom) enclosed in a magnetic shield composed of a magnetic permeability material.

Pilots and travelers alike, wanted to know the time in various places in the world, the airport of departure and arrival are cases in point. The rolex GMT-Master was developed to meet the specific needs of airline pilots and it became the official watch of the famous Pan American World Airways, better known as Pan Am.
Nevertheless it still ranks among our favorite travel watches, as being the ‘mother of all travel watches’. The ceramic’s sheen enhances the colors in a way that is reminiscent of the Plexiglas insert of the original GMT-Master, introduced in 1955 (we’ll have a review for you in two weeks). The advantage that the GMT-Master II has over many ‘standard’ GMT fake watches, is that the 24-hour hand will keep indicating the ‘home time’ (so you’ll know when to call your family or office, and when they are asleep), while you can adjust the normal hour hand to the destination you travelled to, so it indicates your local time.
Everything is superlative. The case is made in TPT quartz, composed of hundreds of layers of quartz filaments piled on top of each other. Then, silica layers are inserted between layers of NTPT carbon, creating this unusual but super-light and resistant black and white material. Although we have to say that the GMT-Master II Pepsi ref. 116719BLNR is quite heavy, due to the use of white gold for the case and bracelet.