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Editorial Squaring The Circle

Or how square-shaped watches wear in relation to round and rectangular ones.

There’s a lot of obsessing about watch size in HODINKEE articles and comments. It’s a subject nearly as apt to create controversy as the always provocative date window, and probably more so, I dare say, than the relative merits of the pin buckle versus the folding clasp. 

Let’s talk about an issue that bears heavily on watch size, which, to my knowledge, has not been fully exposed on the ‘Dink:  How do square watches wear versus their round counterparts? If 40 mm is a kind of populist line of demarcation for wearability in round watches, which make up the overwhelming majority of the products we cover, where ought we draw that line as it applies to the square ones? And oh, let’s agree to leave that other hotly debated topic – watch thickness – for another day.

The TAG Heuer Monaco is a 39mm square watch.

Dimensions alone can be very deceptive. If you’ve ever donned a 39mm TAG Heuer Monaco, a popular example of a square wristwatch, then you know that it wears much larger than its 39mm size might have you expect; that's because it takes up a whole 15.21 square centimeters of wrist real estate. Compare that to a 39mm round watch’s 11.94 square centimeters of  surface area, and you see just how much more heft the square watch packs. In order to find a square watch that delivers a similarly discreet wearing experience, in terms of total surface area, to a 39mm round timepiece – like, say, the Cellini Moonphase – you’d want a square one whose sides measure somewhere between 34mm and 35mm. 

The Rolex Cellini Moonphase measures 39 mm in diameter.

A 39mm round watch, like the Cellini Moonphase, is just 79% as big as a 39mm square watch like the Monaco. If you measure both watches across at their narrowest point (39 mm), they are the same; but the Cellini is only 71% as wide as the Monaco when measured against the latter’s diagonal, which is a little more than 55mm.

In researching this article, I immediately thought of of NOMOS Tetra line, and began looking into some of the sizes they might offer. The NOMOS Tetra, I recalled, accounted for some eminently wearable square watches. While scanning the NOMOS site, I alighted on the recently released Tetra Neomatik 39 and eagerly dove into the specs. To be honest, I was shocked at the thought this company would make a 39 mm square watch. It just seemed so big for them. However, this watch does not actually measure 39mm at all. Its sides, it turns out, are 33mm each, yielding a diagonal measure of 46mm. It appears the name, Tetra Neomatik 39, isn’t based so much on any actual measurement of length, but rather  how this watch wears. I asked Merlin Schwertner, the Vice President of NOMOS USA, if this is true, and he confirmed that it is.

The NOMOS Tetra 39 Neomatik 39 Silvercut.

But back to our Monaco. Suppose you like the feel of the 39mm square case, and you want a round watch that will deliver the same kind of experience, which is to say you want a round watch with a similar footprint on your wrist. To find a round watch with a surface area in the 15.21 centimeter range, you will have to do a bit of math. And of course, we must remember that this can only be an approximation, because squaring the circle is impossible.

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To find our round equivalent to a square watch like the 39mm Monaco, with its surface area of 15.21 square centimeters, we can divide the surface area by pi and then take the square root of our result. This gives us a radius of 2.2cm, and a diameter of 4.4cm, yielding a 44mm round watch.  

Have a look at this recently released 44mm stainless steel Vingt-8 from Kari V., which Stephen wrote about at SIHH earlier this year. 

The 44mm Vingt-8 (left) vs. the 39 mm Vingt-8 (right).

Conveniently, it’s photographed right next to the 39mm version of the Vingt-8, giving an apples-to-apples sense of just how much bigger a 44mm round watch is than a 39mm one with the exact same shape.

Speaking of apples, what about the Apple Watch, which is neither round nor square, but rectangular. The Apple Watch Series 3 Edition in ceramic, pictured here on Ben’s wrist, measures 42.6 mm by 36.5 mm, yielding a surface area of 15.55, quite a bit larger than a round watch billed as 42 mm, yet smaller than a square watch with 42 mm sides.

The Apple Watch Series 3 Edition is a 42.6mm x 36.5mm timepiece, which means it takes up 15.55 square centimeters of  wrist space.

So it would seem that the universal measurement of watch size, the one that gives you the best sense of how it will wear on your wrist, ought not to be its diameter, or even the lengths of its sides, but its area. 

Here's a chart of popular watches of various shapes and the relative wrist space each will take up.