Longines Heritage Skin Diver: Malaysia Price & Review

Leong Wong 22 October 2018

Taking the plunge with a refreshed look.

The Longines Nautilus Skin Diver from 1959

With the state of global affairs today, it’s no wonder we like to reminisce and be inspired by the past. Kind of like time-travelling, really. And if you look at recent watch novelties, they’ve been treading the same path and gleaning some inspiration from history.

At Longines, the brand’s 185 years of watchmaking history easily translates into a bulging archive of vintage and antique watches to get ideas from. This year, it unveiled the Longines Heritage Skin Diver, a watch that harks back to 1959 when the brand launched their first dive watch.

Looks-wise, the new Heritage Skin Diver (above, with leather strap) is very much like its predecessor. It has a uni-directional rotating bezel with a more distinct fluted edge for safety and grip, and black PVD coating with beige Super-LumiNova indexes and dots for viewing in the dark.

The black grained dial of the Heritage Skin Diver is adorned with slim and long transferred hours and minutes, as well as Arabic numerals at 15-minute intervals. The large arrowhead of the hour hand and the second hand are direct inspiration from the 1959 Longines Nautilus, while the crown on the Heritage Skin Diver is much larger for easy winding, which differs from the flatter one in the Nautilus.

Beneath the dial of the Heritage Skin Diver is an unabashedly modern high-performance automatic movement, the Calibre L888.2, based on the ETA A31.L01. And if you intend to put its water resistance to the test, the Heritage Skin Diver will take you right down to 300m, if you really want to go there.

If you’re looking for a reasonably priced dive watch, the Skin Diver is a great value proposition. Endowed with vintage-inspired aesthetics, it is more than capable of handling dives to your desired depth. But if you choose to wear it on dry dock because you prefer terra firma, it would work perfectly well too, especially on those sporty weekends you so look forward to.