A Decade of Pride: Apple Refracts the Rainbow with 2026 ‘Luminance’ Collection
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Fans of Apple’s special edition watch faces and bands will be happy to know that the company isn’t pulling back on its annual Pride Collection for the Apple Watch.
Unlike the February Black Unity Collections, which have become a shadow of their former selves, Apple is continuing its tradition of releasing both a Pride Watch band and a special Apple Watch face to celebrate this year’s Pride Month.
The theme of this year’s collection is Pride Luminance, and it includes a Pride Edition Sport Loop woven from a rainbow of 11 colors of nylon yarns, accompanied by a matching watch face “with colors that refract dynamically to celebrate the vibrancy, spirit, and individuality of the LGBTQ+ community.”
The face is designed in two geometric patterns: radial, featuring rays of color that align with the hour marks, and vertical, reflecting the colorful linear stripes of the weaving pattern. With this collection, users can customize the watch face with even more color options to create a unique expression of themselves and their communities.
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Apple is also continuing the trend it began in 2023 of adding Pride-themed iPhone and iPad wallpapers to mix, allowing members of the LGBTQ+ community, allies, or anyone who just likes the colorful design to match up all their devices with complementary styles.
However, this year’s wallpapers also come with a twist. Like the Pride Luminance Watch Face, the wallpapers support “similarly customizable colors,” giving users an opportunity to express themselves in their own unique way.
That’s a fun change from last year’s Pride Harmony collection, which included a custom wallpaper that, while dynamically changing colors, didn’t allow folks to choose their own flair.
Apple’s Pride Collection is its longest-running series of custom watch bands and faces. This year technically marks its tenth anniversary, although the first edition of the Pride bands weren’t available to the public — at least not officially. They were given as a gift to employees to celebrate 30 years of Apple Pride — the company’s first Diversity Network Association — as “a symbol of [Apple’s] commitment to equality.” However, even though Apple never sold them in its stores, it wasn’t too hard to find employees selling theirs on sites like eBay.
Seemingly realizing it had a potential hit on its hands, Apple released that original band design for Pride Month in 2017 — a woven nylon Apple Watch band with the standard pride flag colors — and also pledged to donate a portion of the proceeds from each sale to LGBTQ advocacy organizations working to bring about positive change.
Thus began an annual tradition, with another woven nylon band in 2018 and the first custom watch face to match the bands. This was followed by a Sport Loop in 2019, then a Sport Band in 2020, marking the first year Apple dropped nylon in favor of fluoroelastomer. The braided Solo Loop returned in 2021 with additional colors woven in to represent more diverse groups: black and brown to symbolize Black and Latinx communities and those who have passed away from or are living with HIV/AIDS, and light blue, pink, and white to represent transgender and nonbinary individuals.
Each year brought matching watch faces, although these were built into watchOS 4.3, 5.2.1, and 6.2.5 and later releases. It wasn’t until watchOS 7 came along with downloadable watch faces that Apple switched to letting folks download the new face directly. An App Clip on the Pride Band package offered quick access, although the new face could be downloaded by anyone. Then, in 2023 Apple leveraged the new customizable Lock Screens of iOS 16 to introduce Pride-themed iPhone wallpapers.
The original 2017–2019 Pride watch faces have been lost to time as they were built into now-defunct watchOS versions, although the spirit of them lives on in the Pride Analog and Pride Digital faces of the 2020 Collection. Those were followed by Pride Woven (2021), Pride Threads (2022), Pride Celebration (2023), Pride Radiance (2024), and Pride Harmony (2025).
The Pride Edition Sport Loop is available for pre-order from the online Apple Store and will be showing up in Apple Store retail locations later this week. The Pride Luminance watch face and iPhone and iPad wallpaper will be coming as part of the watch face and wallpaper galleries in watchOS 26.5, iOS 26.5, and iPadOS 26.5 — which gives us a pretty big hint as to when we can expect those to be released to the public.
