I don't know if this is a known thing or not, but there are a lot of "new" colors in the Apple Watch faces. I thought it was just padding when OS 5 came out, but Pacific Green, Celestial Teal and Mauve were definitely there before the bands released. Seeing some new colors now. No idea if they'll actually be released, but fun to speculate: Light Orange, Light Blue, Purple, Electric Pink (could be for the Hot Pink loop). And for the Nike face: Wolf Gray, Particle Beige, Terra Blush, Total Orange, Barely Rose, Indigo, Blue Orbit, Aurora Green.
Purple would be a nice addition since UV is so hard to come by. And the Nike ones mostly have very Nike-y names so I wouldn't be surprised to see any of them.
You're correct, the colors in the watch face normally come out before the actual bands went on sale, for example, every year in spring when these watch face colors get updated, we could see both the spring and summer collection colors, even if the summer collection is still 3 months before launch.
However, Light Orange, Light Blue, Purple, Electric Pink have been there for quite a while:
- Light Orange came out when Hermes orange sport band was out in fall 2016.
- Light Blue was probably referring to the 2nd generation of Blue in fall 2015 since they came out at the same time.
- Purple was there at the very beginning but we haven't seen any band of this color.
- Electric Pink was out with the Electric Pink sport loop of fall 2017.
About the Nike colors, Wolf Gray, Terra Blush, Total Orange, Aurora Green are the 4 new colors that could totally be possible to launch with new bands! The other colors:
- Particle Beige is already out with the Smokey Mauve/Particle Beige sport band released this month.
- Barely Rose was out with the Barely Rose/Pearl Pink sport band of spring 2018.
- Indigo was out with the Obsidian/Black sport band of summer 2017, although now we also have a separate Obsidian color in the Nike watch faces, which is totally weird...
- Blue Orbit was out with the Blue Orbit/Gamma Blue sport band of summer 2017.
