Choosing your first piece

Measure the wrist before you look at anything

Take a tailor's tape around the wrist bone, snug but not tight, and write the figure down. It decides more than taste does.

Under 16 cm, stay at 36 to 39 mm: a Datejust 36, a 39 mm Royal Oak, an Aquanaut. Between 16 and 18 cm almost everything works, and this is where the 40 to 41 mm Submariner and Daytona sit most naturally. Above 18 cm a 42 mm Offshore or a 44 mm Big Bang stops looking large and starts looking correct.

Diameter is the number people quote. Lug-to-lug is the number that decides whether a watch fits.

Lug-to-lug is the distance from the tip of one lug to the other, and it is what actually overhangs a narrow wrist. A 40 mm case with 51 mm of lug can sit worse than a 42 mm case with 48. If the lugs pass the edge of the flat part of your wrist, the watch is wrong for you, whatever the chart says. Ask us for the lug-to-lug of anything on this site and we will measure the piece in front of us rather than quote a catalogue.

Then the thickness, which nobody checks and everybody notices

A first watch is worn under a shirt cuff for eight hours a day. Anything past 13 mm will catch on the cuff, and past 15 mm it stops going under one at all. A Datejust is around 11.5 mm, a no-date Submariner around 12.5, a Royal Oak under 11, an Offshore chronograph past 14.

If the watch is for a desk, a keyboard and a jacket sleeve, thin wins every argument it is in. If it is for a weekend and a polo shirt, thickness is worth spending on presence.

One dial you will not tire of

First pieces get worn daily, and daily is where novelty dies. Black, white and blue outlast every fashionable dial colour ever made; a fluted-bezel Datejust with a white dial or a black-dial Submariner looks exactly as right after ten years of mornings as it did on the first.

Buy the unusual dial second, not first — a salmon, a green, a meteorite, a diamond bezel. They are wonderful and they are the watch you reach for on a Friday, not the one you reach for every day. If you already own one steel watch you never take off, ignore this paragraph entirely and buy the colour.

Where the money should go

Put the premium in the movement, not the bracelet. A Swiss clone calibre changes how the watch feels every single day: the sweep, the pusher, the way the date snaps at midnight. A strap can be changed in a minute for the price of a dinner.

Most references on this site are offered with either a Japanese base or a Swiss clone, and the gap between them is printed on each page rather than hidden in a variant menu. If you want the same reference quoted both ways side by side, ask the concierge and you will get both figures in one message.

The one question worth answering honestly

Ask yourself whether you want the watch, or the reaction to the watch. Both are legitimate. They lead to different purchases: the first ends with a 36 mm Datejust or an Explorer that you will still be wearing in a decade, the second with an iced bezel or a Nautilus in rose gold. Trouble only starts when somebody answers the second question and buys as though they had answered the first.

Tell us which it is. It changes what we recommend more than the budget does.

Before you order, ask for these four things

1. The lug-to-lug and the thickness, measured off the piece in front of us, not from a catalogue.
2. The base calibre, stated in writing, with the rate we recorded on the timing machine.
3. The macro film of your exact watch — dial, caseback, clasp and movement running — before it is packed.
4. What happens if it does not suit you: fourteen days to return, thirty to exchange, and a two-year warranty against mechanical defects.

Any shop that hesitates over the first three has told you something useful.