Color coding sequential data

I'm trying to plot hysteresis curves and would like to use color coding to help decipher certain phases in the graph. In other words, I would describe this as plotting 12 discrete points on a graph, representative of individual hours on a 12 hour clock, each discrete point would plot at a certain point around the circle, but instead of numbers indicating where we are in time, a colormap would help distinguish this. I'm not sure what to call this, so my online searching has not been helpful.

% Here is my code currently, which does not include a time-based
% color-coding at the moment

figure(99) 
hold on
for i = 1:6
    subplot(2,3,i)
plot(fluid_conductivity(:,i),conductivity_bulk,'r-x')
end
hold off

Attached is an image of someone else's graph that has accomplished this in case the description above is confusing.