A good dive watch doesn’t have to cost a week’s pay. Some of the most honest, hard-wearing watches I’ve ever owned cost less than a nice dinner for two, and a few of them genuinely meet the standards that let you take them past the shallows. The trick is knowing the difference between a real

A dive watch bezel is the rotating ring around the edge of the dial, marked with a scale of 60 minutes. Its whole job is to track how much time has passed since you started something — a dive, a parking meter, a pot on the stove — without any digital screen or mental arithmetic.

There is an actual standard, and most dive-styled watches do not meet it. Most watches that look like dive watches are not dive watches in any formal sense. The word diver on a dial is decoration unless the watch meets a specific international standard. That standard is ISO 6425, and it is unusually demanding: it