The 16 best Apple Watch faces you should be using

Wayfinder is an exclusive face for the Apple Watch Ultra designed to cater to the needs of outdoor adventure enthusiasts such as hikers and divers. The high-contrast display makes it easy to see in bright daylight, and it’s the only watch face that provides a specific Night Mode, turning all the elements on the face red to preserve your vision on nighttime excursions. You get room for up to eight complications — four in the corners and four in the middle cluster — and you can tap on the bezel ring to immediately turn it into a compass and show your current latitude and longitude in the inner ring.

California is a great option for folks who like the more traditional look, and it’s especially great for the always-on display models, where the watch face is always shown in one form or another. You can configure it with a mix of Roman and Arabic numerals in different styles or simply go with pills for a more classic design. There’s room for two complications: a text one that defaults to the current date and a single, small circular one in the bottom-center position. However, we think this one looks best when it’s kept simple.

Chronograph Pro offers a precision timer like a classic analog stopwatch, with modes for recording time on scales of 60, 30, 6, or 3 seconds, or a tachymeter to measure speed based on time traveled over a fixed distance. Tapping the center of the face switches into timing mode, and you can also surround the face with four corner complications of your choice.

Contour is an artistic face designed explicitly to show off the curved bezels introduced with the Apple Watch Series 7. Numerals appear in a custom font tucked into the edge of the display and morph in size to reflect the current hour. Like the California face, Contour offers two complications, but you’ll probably want to use these sparingly.

Gradient is a great choice for folks who prefer a colorful minimalist design. In its standard form, it’s simply a pair of hands against a gradient background. There are quite a few gradients and styles to choose from, but if you want to add complications, you’ll need to opt for a more traditional circular look to make room for them in the corners. However, this is another one that we think is at its very best in its uncomplicated full-screen glory.

Infograph was first introduced in 2018 to show off the larger screen on the Apple Watch Series 4 — and how much more detail can fit onto it. The traditional analog clock is joined by up to eight complications — four in each corner and four as subdials in the center cluster. The top-center complication also offers an extra twist here, with the ability to show a band of semicircular text around the edge that can highlight your next appointment, current weather conditions, upcoming tasks, and more.

Memoji is one of the few Apple Watch faces that you can truly make your own, since it lets you put your own custom avatar right on your watch. You can choose from any of Apple’s standard array of Animoji characters, use a Memoji you’ve created on your iPhone, or even create a new one using the watchOS Memoji app. You can even have your Apple Watch display a new character each time you raise your wrist. This face also offers room for two basic complications.

Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse are two of Apple’s most whimsical faces from the original Apple Watch, turning your modern smartwatch into a classic toy-style timepiece. Mickey or Minnie’s arms rotate to indicate the time while their feet tap out the seconds. This was also the first watch face where you could make your watch speak the time, and while that function has since been expanded to work on any watch face, this is still the only one that offers a different voice; hold two fingers down on this watch face and instead of Siri’s voice, you’ll hear Mickey or Minnie read out the current time,

Modular is the original watch face for folks who prefer to see as much information at a glance as possible. It’s essentially the digital clock version of Infograph, and it’s almost entirely made up of complications. There’s room for six here, so it’s not quite as flexible as some of the other faces, but those six complications can be added in three different sizes, including a large center complication that shows more information than you’ll get on any other watch face. This can provide a list of tasks or upcoming appointments, the full name of whatever song is currently playing, detailed workout info, or a complete weather forecast. The other complications are made up of four dials and a spot for the current date above the time. Variations on this one include Modular Compact, which provides room for three complications with an analog clock in the corner, and Modular Duo for Apple Watch Series 7 and later devices, which gives you room for a second large complication in place of the three bottom dials.

Nike Faces are part of a collection of faces that were once the exclusive domain of Apple’s Nike Edition models. However, now that Apple has stopped manufacturing these Nike-branded models, it’s unlocked its Nike watch face collection for every Apple Watch owner to enjoy. This includes the Nike Analog, Nike Bounce, Nike Compact, and Nike Digital, but it’s the Nike Hybrid face that offers the best of all worlds, letting you choose between analog and digital clocks with a Windrunner-inspired design. It’s the most customizable of the bunch and offers room for up to five complications.

Photos and Portraits offer two different ways to show off your favorite pictures right on your wrist. The Photos face has been around since the beginning, although Apple has enhanced it over the years to let you add color filters and display content from Memories. Photos can change every time you raise your wrist to show an album, memory, or any custom selection of up to 24 photos. In watchOS 8, Apple expanded this with a new Portraits face that displays a bokeh effect with the digital time layered in front of or even partially behind your photo’s subject. As of watchOS 9, this works with dogs and cats in addition to people and landscapes. You can also turn the Digital Crown to zoom in on your subject.

Siri leverages Apple’s digital assistant to show you the information you need at relevant times. This is presented in the form of cards from Apple’s first-party apps and any third-party ones that support the Siri watch face. It can include things like news headlines and weather for the day, upcoming appointments, suggested HomeKit scenes, a song that’s currently playing, or a traffic report for your evening commute. You can turn the Digital Crown to scroll through the cards, and there’s room for a complication dial in the top-left corner.

You can also share your customized Apple Watch faces with friends and family. To do this, press and hold to access the face controls and tap the Share button.

From here, you can select one of your frequent contacts or scroll down and choose Messages or Mail to send your watch face to someone else. You’ll have the opportunity to edit or add your own custom message, or you can just quickly send it out with the default message.