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Rolex 6062 Stelline

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Padellone › 6062

Rolex 6062 Stelline, yellow gold, triple-calendar moonphase in an Oyster case
Rolex 6062 Stelline, yellow gold, triple-calendar moonphase in an Oyster case

The 6062 is the Oyster-cased half of Rolex's only triple-calendar moonphase pair, introduced at the 1950 Basel Fair as the waterproof counterpart to the non-Oyster 8171. Day, date, month, and moonphase share a 36mm case with a screw-down caseback and crown — the same waterproof construction Rolex was building into its sport watches, wrapped around a complication the sport watches never got. Production ran roughly three years, ending by 1953 alongside the 8171. Collectors call it the "Stelline," Italian for "little stars," after its most recognized dial: applied five-pointed star hour markers, more common than any of the reference's other configurations.

The 6062 runs on caliber 655, an automatic movement Rolex built specifically for the model — not the 8171's caliber A.295 CPL, despite the two sharing a dial architecture, an era, and a family resemblance strong enough that they are still discussed as a pair. It is, by a wide margin, the more expensive of the two at auction. A black-dial, diamond-marker 6062 has twice held the record for the most expensive Rolex ever sold, most recently broken again by a second example of the same configuration in October 2025.

Core facts

detail value
reference 6062
nickname Stelline (Italian: "little stars"), after the star-marker dial
family Padellone / triple calendar moonphase
production Basel Fair 1950 – c. 1953 (editorial consensus; a Christie's catalogue essay gives "approximately 10 years" — see Production outline)
total production under 1,000 across all metals (collector estimates vary; see Production outline)
case diameter 36mm
case construction two-piece Oyster, screw-down caseback and crown
water resistance waterproof Oyster case
case materials 18K yellow gold (most common); stainless steel and 18K pink gold (both scarcer, roughly comparable in surviving numbers)
movement Cal. 655 "Super-Balance" (automatic, in-house, 9¾ lignes)
complications day, month (twin apertures at 12); date (peripheral pointer); moonphase (blue champlevé enamel disc at 6)
crystal acrylic, domed
dial signature "Rolex Oyster Perpetual"; "Swiss" (precious metal) or "Swiss Made" (steel, and precious-metal Explorer dials) beneath the moonphase
crown screw-down; Super-Oyster (most common) or Twin-Lock

What the 6062 is

Rolex spent the late 1940s assembling the pieces of the modern Oyster Perpetual — waterproof case, automatic winding, chronometer certification, a date window — without yet combining them into a genuine complication. The 6062 and the 8171 were the answer: a full calendar with moonphase, built in series, at a moment when nothing else in Rolex's catalog carried anything more complicated than a date. The 6062 is the Oyster half of that pair. Where the 8171 uses a dress-watch snap-on caseback, the 6062 is a true Oyster: screw-down back, screw-down crown, waterproof.

That construction is the whole story of why collectors rate the 6062 above the 8171. A Phillips collectors' guide to the reference puts it plainly: the 8171 is "unquestionably a more conventional 'dress watch' design," while the 6062 "offered the best of both worlds" — a complication serious enough for evening wear, in a case ordinary enough for daily use. The 6062 is considered the first triple-calendar self-winding wristwatch built into a waterproof case, and, for Rolex specifically, the only time the company put a complicated self-winding movement inside its Oyster case design.

"Stelline" and the other dials

  •  
    The "Dark Star" 6062 — yellow gold Stelline dial with star hour markers, oxidized case patina
  •  
    Moonphase detail, blue champlevé enamel disc with man-in-the-moon face

Stelline is Italian for "little stars," the diminutive plural of stella. It names the reference's most recognized dial: applied five-pointed star hour markers, more common in the surviving population than any of the 6062's other dial types. Two generations exist. The earlier version — catalogued by dial-maker Stern as Type 755 — sets a separate lume plot beside each star; the later Type 453 centers the lume inside the star itself. Type 755 turns up across every documented case-serial batch; Type 453 is confined to the earliest batches, serials 690,xxx and 788,xxx.

Stelline is one of six original dial configurations. The others are dagger markers, an "Explorer" dial with applied Arabic numerals at 3 and 9 (typically stainless steel, though a handful of gold examples exist, including three pink gold examples among the rarest 6062s known), a pyramid or "Egyptian" marker style confined to the last case batches and the scarcest of the silvered dial types, spade markers, and — rarest of all — a solid black lacquer dial. Seven black dials are documented; three of those carry baguette-cut diamond indices in place of markers, the configuration behind the reference's most valuable results.

Except for the black dials, every 6062 dial is silvered and genuinely two-tone: a matte grainé center and a smoother, slightly darker outer date track, a distinction that age and patina have generally sharpened rather than erased. A dial that reads as a single flat tone today is the surest sign of a service replacement or a refinish. The signature beneath the moonphase is the other tell — steel dials read "Swiss Made," precious-metal dials read "Swiss" alone except on Explorer-dial examples, which read "Swiss Made" regardless of case metal. A dial signed "T Swiss T" is a service dial: tritium is a lume material Rolex adopted well after the 6062 left production.

The moonphase itself is a blue champlevé enamel disc — the same technique Patek Philippe used on its own calendar watches of the period — supplied, like the rest of the dial, by the Stern family firm (Christie's catalogue essay names Beyeler as the maker of record, with Stern Frères handling delivery and mounting). A small painted face rides in the moon, smiling faintly at the day and month apertures above it.

The Oyster case

 
Stainless steel 6062, "The New Standard" — screw-down crown and Oyster case construction, Explorer dial

At 36mm, the 6062's case is close in size to a contemporary Datejust or Explorer, not the oversized 38mm dress case Rolex built for the 8171. The construction is a genuine two-piece waterproof Oyster: screw-down caseback, screw-down crown, in either the more common Super-Oyster pattern or, on some examples, a Twin-Lock crown. Being sealed rather than snapped shut has one practical downside collectors run into directly — the case traps dust and haze inside the crystal over decades, and cleaning it is a harder job than popping a dress-watch caseback.

Precious-metal cases came from Genex, the Geneva casemaker that began as the case-making arm of bracelet-maker Gay Frères before Rolex brought it in-house; a number 12 struck inside a key, punched on the interior of the caseback, is Genex's mark. Stainless steel cases came from Spillman, the firm that had built Rolex's original Oyster case in the 1920s. One case-numbering detail is specific to the pink gold run: some examples were first stamped with a different reference, 6063, before Rolex struck that number through with engraved lines and re-stamped 6062 beneath it — evidence that the pink gold case was, at least briefly, treated as its own catalog entry before being folded into the 6062 line.

Movement: caliber 655

The 6062 runs caliber 655, an automatic movement built specifically for the model and sometimes called the "Super-Balance 9¾" after its 9¾-ligne dimension. The base movement carries 17 or 18 jewels — 17-jewel examples turn up disproportionately on watches sold into the US market, which taxed higher jewel counts more heavily — rising to 25 or 26 jewels once the calendar module is counted. Every 6062 movement was chronometer-certified. The automatic winding module was reworked specifically to let the day, month, and moonphase correction pushers pass through the caseband without compromising the case's water resistance.

That caliber number is a genuine point of disagreement in the record. Phillips' own 2024 collectors' guide to the 6062 describes the movement as "carried over from the 8171" and calls it "the same self-winding caliber inside" both references. Auction-house lot cataloguing says otherwise: two separate Christie's lot descriptions and a Sotheby's lot description for individual 6062 examples all name caliber 655 specifically, and Hodinkee's dedicated in-depth piece on the reference does the same. Four independent, specific citations naming 655 outweigh one general editorial line describing a shared caliber, and 655 is the reading used throughout this article. The two movements are close relatives from the same in-house programme and the same era — but they are not, on the weight of the evidence, the identical caliber.

The 8171 and the complication pair

The 6062's sibling is the 8171, the non-Oyster dress version of the same complication set, produced concurrently in the same three case metals. Same complication layout — day and month at 12, moonphase at 6, date on a peripheral pointer track — same era, same eventual discontinuation by 1953. The differences are the case and the movement: the 8171 is 38mm with a snap-on caseback and caliber A.295 CPL; the 6062 is 36mm, waterproof, and runs caliber 655.

Rolex marketed the 6062 as the "Cosmograph" in its own early-1950s print advertising — a name it would not attach to the Daytona for another decade. Neither the 6062 nor the 8171 founded a lasting line. Rolex replaced both with the simpler Day-Date in 1956, which kept the date but dropped the month display and the moonphase entirely, and the company did not put a moonphase back into a production wristwatch until the Cellini Moonphase in 2017 — more than sixty years later, and outside this wiki's pre-2020 vintage scope.

Auction record

 
The "Bao Dai" — black dial, baguette-diamond indices, twice the record holder for the most expensive Rolex sold at auction

The 6062's auction history is dominated by the black-diamond-dial "Bao Dai," which has twice held the record for the most expensive Rolex ever sold, and by a small group of named, individually tracked examples that have traded repeatedly over the past two decades.

Venue Date Lot / watch Material Configuration Result
Phillips de Pury, Geneva 2002 "Bao Dai" 18K yellow gold, black dial baguette-diamond indices (5 diamonds, at 12, 2, 4, 8, 10) CHF 370,000 (a record for the most expensive Rolex sold at auction at the time)
Phillips, Geneva Watch Auction May 2017 "Bao Dai," resold 18K yellow gold, black dial same watch as above CHF 5,066,000 (again the most expensive Rolex sold at auction, until surpassed months later by the "Paul Newman" Daytona)
Christie's, New York 2012 ex-Gordon Bethune, single-owner sale 18K pink gold, Stelline — USD 590,500
Christie's, Geneva May 2019 separate pink gold Stelline, re-lumed with period radium 18K pink gold, Stelline — CHF 800,000 hammer (CHF 975,000 with premium)
Phillips, Geneva Watch Auction November 2019 ex-Gordon Bethune, resold 18K pink gold, Stelline — CHF 1,940,000
Phillips, Geneva Watch Auction November 2023 "The New Standard," fresh to market stainless steel, Explorer dial unpolished, non-lume dial CHF 2,117,000
Monaco Legend Group, Exclusive Timepieces, Monte Carlo 18-19 October 2025 Lot 111, case no. 942,536 18K yellow gold, black dial baguette-diamond indices (6 diamonds, at 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11) USD 6,200,000 (a new record for the reference)

Twice, the most expensive Rolex ever sold at auction has been the same "Bao Dai" watch. Bao Dai, the last Emperor of Vietnam, visited Rolex in Geneva during 1954 peace talks and reportedly asked to see the company's most expensive watch; Rolex produced this black-dial 6062 with baguette-diamond indices. Consigned by a young Aurel Bacs to Phillips de Pury in 2002, it sold for CHF 370,000 against a CHF 200,000 reserve, then reappeared at Phillips Geneva in May 2017 and sold for CHF 5,066,000, reclaiming the title until that year's record-breaking "Paul Newman" Daytona took it a few months later.

In October 2025, a second black-diamond-dial 6062 broke the reference's own record. This one, case number 942,536, carries six diamonds set at 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, and 11 rather than the Bao Dai's five. It sold at Monaco Legend Group's Exclusive Timepieces auction in Monte Carlo for USD 6.2 million, the highest price ever paid for a 6062 and, per Forbes, the third-highest price ever paid for any Rolex at auction. It is one of only three known black-diamond-dial 6062s and had previously sold at Antiquorum in 2006, as part of The Mondani Collection of Rolex Wristwatches, for USD 391,000, a fifteen-fold increase in under two decades. Hodinkee's pre-sale preview independently flagged the same lot ahead of the auction, describing it as "the Holy Grail of Rolex" and noting it is one of two known 6062s in this specific diamond layout.

Below the headline results, condition and dial originality move 6062 prices more than any particular configuration. Christie's watch-department head Remi Guillemin, quoted in Hodinkee's survey of more than 100 documented 6062 sales, put it directly: "It's about condition more than any specific configuration." Refinished or service-dial examples have sold for a small fraction of original-dial results in comparable case condition — figures as low as USD 64,000–257,000 against seven-figure results for original dials from the same auction seasons.

Collecting considerations

Condition and dial originality decide 6062 value far more than case metal or dial pattern. A two-tone silvered dial that reads as a single flat shade today has likely been refinished or replaced; the "Swiss" or "Swiss Made" signature beneath the moonphase, and its match to the case metal and dial type, is the fastest originality check. Service dials are commonly marked "T Swiss T," a tritium reference that postdates the 6062's own production.

Configuration hierarchy runs black-dial diamond examples at the very top — three known, two of them now seven-figure-plus watches — followed by the other black dials, then the rarer dial types (pyramid, Explorer) and the more common Stelline, roughly in that order, with steel and pink gold both commanding a premium over yellow gold despite yellow gold's numerical dominance in the surviving population. Because the case is a sealed, screw-down Oyster rather than a snap-on dress back, service history matters more here than on the 8171: a caseback that has never been opened, with sharp, unpolished case lines and crisp numbering between the lugs, is the strongest originality signal a 6062 can offer.

Related references

The 8171 is the 6062's non-Oyster sibling — same complication set, same era, different case and a different in-house movement (caliber A.295 CPL rather than the 6062's caliber 655). See Reference:8171 and the Padellone family hub for the pair together.

The Rolex Datocompax chronographs (4767, 5036, 6036, 6236) are the chronograph-plus-calendar complications of the same broad era, built on a Valjoux 72C ébauche rather than an in-house automatic caliber. They are not mechanically related to the 6062, but occupied the same complication-flagship ambition in Rolex's catalog before the company settled on the Submariner, Explorer, and GMT-Master as its identity.

The Day-Date, introduced in 1956, replaced both the 6062 and the 8171 in Rolex's catalog — keeping the date complication the market wanted while dropping the month display and moonphase the market apparently did not.

Rolex itself returned to the concept in September 2026 with the Perpetual Padellone (refs. 53505/53506), a modern annual-calendar moonphase dress watch that officially adopts the "Padellone" name and credits both the 8171 and the 6062 as its ancestors. It sits well outside this wiki's pre-2020 scope as current production; see the Padellone family hub for that context.

Sources

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