It's complicated: Edox Delfin review

This is my Edox Delfin. I bought it for the princely sum of approximately 30 USD equivalent. Same price as my NOS Camys and a hair more than three orders of spicy pork with rice and three bubble teas at my local Chinese place.

Good deal. Edox was and still is a manufacturer of pretty good watches. While I cannot attest to how well put together their new ones are, my Delfin is a-okay. The movement is a nice Adolf Schild ST1950, beating at a not-at-all-uncommon 21 600 A/h. It's the third vintage watch I have that beats at that frequency, most others beat at 18 000; in fact, my clocks beat at 18 000 too, so my room is perpetually flooded with the sound of pallet pins and jewels striking escape wheel teeth five times a second.

I'm struggling to find bombastic English to describe it. Most of my reviews are filled to the brim with effusive nonsense and comparisons that aim to make the reader exhale from their nose in recognition of my unparalleled comedic genius. It's just that my Edox is kind of… boring. It's not really too boring to be completely honest and I still love wearing it, but it just feels like it's taking its time to work its way into my heart. It has little sentimental value, which may contribute to that. Well, my Lambda LCD Quartz has no sentimental value, but I could almost say I love it more. It didn't commemorate any achievement, coming too late to celebrate the end of mid-year exams and too early to celebrate whatever else is going on right now. Was this an impulse buy? I really don't think so, because I thought about it for two weeks, which is just about my average time taken before drop-kicking my wallet. Besides, 30 USD for a running Edox in good condition is something I know some people would decide on in under thirty seconds.

Strange emotions aside, here's the cream of the review. I hate the crown more than I hate nepotism and corrupt politicians. I have seen larger ants. It's about half the width of a Madagascan hissing cockroach's head. I will buy twenty at the pet shop and let them loose in the dwellings of my enemies. It's about as thick as one strand of cheap wool. It hurts my pretty-boy private-school soft hands to wind. I wind it with my thumb and middle fingernails. I keep it wound at all times so that I never have to wind it from zero to full wind ever again. It's been two or three weeks since I bought it.

And what's with 19mm lugs? It looked like 18mm in-store and an 18mm band doesn't look out of place in any way shape or form. At least I found a watch that can accept my 20mm leather rally strap, on which it looks gorgeous. I'm South African, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that an incorrectly sized strap fits, because we have a tendency to force things into place. If it doesn't work out, we take it out on our children or become hobbyist alcoholics. It's versatile, but I like to think of it as more of a sporty piece with its blue dial.

While the movement is good and signed, it lacks decoration and hacking. I don't care about decoration, because the slightly more expensive three orders of spicy pork also features no decoration and can't even tell the time. Styrofoam cases are also a big no-no. Someone needs to teach me a lesson in watches, because out of my ten (I put number eleven out of service just a few days ago) watches, only ONE hacks, and it's a quartz. So for the next purchase, hacking is likely a big box to tick. Knowing myself, I'm probably just going to buy a green dialed, non-hacking and hand-wound Van Dyk that's at my jeweller's once some money rolls in. What's different about that one? Dial colour and nothing else.

That's probably why I bought this watch. It doesn't give me anything any of my other watches can't, bar 19mm lugs, which should be given one last breakfast before being shot by a ten-gauge slug between the eyes. All that it gives me is blue. It's like the one character included in poorly written films by irrelevant and broke studios so that their cast looks diverse. You know, the character that does absolutely nothing except crack one half-baked pun right before their death. At least my leather rally strap has a home now, because it was almost the same price as the watch.

In conclusion, I love my Edox, but we're at a complicated stage in our relationship. I don't want to live without it, but living with it is less spicy than I thought it would be. I imagined it to be a wild ride by its looks, but it's more akin to leisurely reading in front of a fireplace. It's like the opposite of one staff member at my school whose Instagram I unearthed recently. In school uniform she's rather Seiko SKX, but on Instagram, she's more Sea-Dweller. Yikes.

Edox Delfin. Good watch.

*Update: I wrote this review a week or so before publishing (is my Edox really that yawn-inducing?) and have since given it a good clean. I need to buy a new gasket, which I'm probably going to do tomorrow. Other than that, I got rid of that nasty, somewhat chocolatey fingerprint that the last watchmaker meft inside the crystal.