How to Install Custom Apple Watch Faces
To install a custom Apple Watch face, open the free Watch Luxe app on your iPhone, pick a design, and tap Add — it syncs to your Apple Watch in one tap and appears as a photo-style face. The whole process takes about two minutes. One thing worth knowing up front: Apple doesn't allow fully native third-party watch faces, so every custom face — from any app — installs through Apple's official photo-face pipeline. You'll need iOS 16.2 or later and watchOS 10 or later.
What you need
- An iPhone running iOS 16.2 or later.
- An Apple Watch running watchOS 10 or later.
- The free Watch Luxe app — on the App Store it's listed as "WatchLux: Watch Faces Gallery", so that's the name to search. It's free to download, no account required, and the free tier includes a rotating set of faces every week.
Install a custom watch face: step by step
- Open Watch Luxe on your iPhone. The gallery loads straight away — there is no sign-up step before you can browse.
- Browse the gallery. There are 500+ faces across 13+ categories — anime, luxury, minimal, dark/OLED, 3D depth and more. You can preview the full gallery in your browser, or see this week's new faces first.
- Tap Add on the face you want. That's the entire install action — no files, no sideloading, no companion profiles.
- The face syncs to your watch in one tap. It travels through Apple's official pipeline and appears on your wrist as a photo-style face, ready to use.
- Switch faces anytime. Press and hold your watch face and swipe to move between every face you've added — Apple's designs and your custom ones sit side by side.
Do custom Apple Watch faces work without an app?
No. Apple Watch ships only with Apple's own face designs, and its built-in Face Gallery has no way to browse or install third-party designs. To put a custom design on your watch you need an iPhone app such as Watch Luxe, which delivers each design through Apple's official photo-face pipeline — the only route Apple allows.
This is the honest trade-off behind every custom watch face app. Apple has never opened watchOS to fully native third-party faces, so no app — Watch Luxe included — can add new hands or complication layouts. What an app can do is deliver striking full-screen designs through the photo-face mechanism, and that is exactly what the 500+ face gallery is built around.
Can you install faces directly on the watch?
No — installation starts on your iPhone. Apple routes face syncing through iOS, so you browse and add designs in the Watch Luxe iPhone app, and each face lands on your watch automatically. Once a face is on your wrist you manage it like any other: press and hold the watch face to switch, customize, or remove it.
On-watch management works the same as it does for Apple's built-in designs. Apple's official guide to changing Apple Watch faces covers switching, reordering, and customizing from the wrist — everything there applies to a face you added with Watch Luxe.
Do custom faces drain battery?
No — a custom photo-style face uses no more battery than Apple's own Photos face. Apple Watch has an OLED display that lights each pixel individually, so what matters is how bright the face is, not where it came from. A design with a mostly black background lights fewer pixels and is the battery-friendly choice.
If battery life is your priority, start with the dark & OLED faces — black-background designs picked specifically so the display lights as few pixels as possible.
How do I remove a custom face?
Press and hold your current watch face, swipe to the face you want to delete, swipe up on it, then tap Remove. It disappears from the watch immediately. The design itself stays in the Watch Luxe gallery, so you can re-add it any time with one tap — removing a face from your watch never deletes it from the app.
You can also remove faces from the Watch app on your iPhone: under My Faces, tap Edit and delete any face from the list. A practical habit is to keep a small rotation on the watch and treat the gallery as your archive — a new collection drops every week, so the rotation never gets stale.
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