Hands-On The Longines Heritage Skin Diver
Great vintage watch homages have come to be one of the expected highlights of my trip to the Longines booth at Baselworld each year, and 2018 was not a disappointment in this regard. In addition to the wonderful Longines Heritage Military Watch with its faux-patinated dial, and new ladies’ sizing (and dials) for the Heritage Legend Diver, we were also treated to the great-looking Heritage Skin Diver. And it's that last watch we’re going hands-on with today.
The 2018 Longines Heritage Skin Diver
I was shown this watch during a meeting with Longines executives and told that it would not officially launch with the first wave of 2018 products. It would become available in late 2018, they said. As you can see, it's a really great-looking tribute to a historically important Longines, the Longines Nautilus Skin Diver – the first dive watch from Longines, in fact. It's a watch that I'd personally like to spend some more time with in the future outside of the less than ideal context of a trade show booth.
It seems pretty obvious, but one of aspect of this watch’s design that should not be overlooked is its size. This is a large timepiece, and it feels large on the wrist. This is, in and of itself, not a bad thing. Wrist presence is a quality one tends to expect and even want from tool watches in general. But, on trying it on in Basel, the Skin Diver felt large for its 42mm diameter and 13.75mm height. I chalk this up to the way the lugs extend a good distance from the case, causing it to float somewhat uneasily on my seven-inch wrist. (The lug-to-lug length is 52.55mm.) I think that this design would have benefitted from a smaller diameter. An incremental reduction to 40mm diameter would have been great. (Incidentally, 40mm was the size of the original Nautilus Skin Diver.)
A vintage Longines Nautilus Skin Diver. (Photo: Courtesy Phillips)
On the back, you'll see an embossed image of a diver with a spear with the words "The Longines Skin Diver Watch." The unidirectional bezel is very easy to turn thanks to the deep crenelations along its edge. This bezel is made of PVD-coated steel that has been executed to recall the original plastic one found on the late '50s original.
The watch's profile shows off the case geometry and bezel.
The Skin Diver's water resistance is an estimable 300 meters, thanks in part to a crown that screws down. Ever since I heard dive watch expert and HODINKEE contributor Jason Heaton observe that a screw-down crown really is one of the most important features for a dive watch, it's been something I've kept in the back of my mind when evaluating purpose-built timepieces for diving. Sure, with proper gaskets and tolerances, the screw down function isn't necessary for water resistance per se, but it certainly cannot hurt. After all, if the crown is screwed in, there's zero chance of it catching on the fabric of your wet suit or other gear and flooding the case. Even if the vast majority of consumers will stop short of testing the limits of this watch's max depth rating, there is a comfort in knowing that a watch exceeds the ISO standard for diving.
The Skin Diver is a great looking watch on the wrist, though its lugs do feel large in proportion to the 42mm case, which itself is indeed not small.
The Skin Diver’s dial is one place where it really excels. Look at the pillowy lume plots for the cardinal hours and hour markers. It conveys all the richness of a well kept vintage watch from the late-'50s to early '60s. A similarly thick application of faux-aged lume fills the arrow-shaped hour and minute hands, which traverse a dial that has a course, anti-reflective property to it. This is one of the darker applications of faux-aged lume that I have seen on a model that nods to a brand's heritage, Longines or otherwise. The Longines logo is at 12 o’clock, and the world “Automatic” is spelled out in script text at the six o’clock position.
The movement inside is the L888. From this movement, the Skin Diver derives displays for the hours, for the minutes, and for the seconds, with an impressive power reserve of 65 hours. The movement runs at the somewhat unusual rate of 25,200 vph (or 3.5 Hz).
And then there are the three strap and bracelet options: a plain brown leather strap, a black tropic rubber strap, and a mesh steel bracelet. And while each has its own appeal, I think that two of them (the tropic strap and the bracelet) are the winners, with the nice mesh bracelet option taking the slight edge when you consider that each option will set you back the same amount of money, $2,600.
Overall, the Longines Heritage Skin Diver is a great-looking contemporary dive watch with more than ample water resistance that revives an important design from from the Longines archives. It manages to do this while incorporating enough modern features to excite watch collectors and SCUBA enthusiasts of today.
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