Swatch 1984 Rouge & Noir Review

There's a thing you can count on, if you are selling watches on behalf of a cat charity, you know I'm going to buy one. A watch that is, not another cat.

Thanks to @benswatchclub who sold several watches after using them for a scratch test video (Scratches? Cat Scratches? Geddit?) and then put them on eBay where I won (sniped) this Swatch after watching it for days. I'm also going to reuse some of his pictures from his eBay listing for this review.

https://youtu.be/0oX1itHnqcY?si=EnKr_saAqNRPGRgf

The Swatch "Rouge & Noir" comes in one of these long "New Gent" cardboard boxes which announces that this is a reissue/reimagining of the "Chrono-Tech" Swatch from 1984. I'm not going to delve into the nostalgia from this time, but this was the year that Miami Vice first aired (with all their fake Rolexes and fake Ferraris), and nobody I knew at school actually owned a Swatch because we all had cheaper Casios (and lives to live) instead.

Not much has changed with this design apart from the size which is now 41mm. As a result, the date window has been moved into the edge of the centre black circle on the dial due to Swatch using the same movement in all their watches regardless of the size. That was a bit lazy of them.

The original 34mm version didn't have a 3 on the dial either because the date was further over in its place, but the even smaller ladies version did because it didn't have a date complication at all.

Maybe it's me, but I'm sure Swatch could have printed a 3 next to the date window on this watch to make it look less odd. The military time on the black inner ring is still a nice touch though and makes this a field watch, I suppose, if your idea of the "field" is a shopping mall.

Nothing much to see on the back except the standard battery hatch. If you have a pre-decimal British penny, it's the perfect thing for opening these battery hatches without scratching them, just so you know. The underside of the strap is ribbed for your pleasure.

Like all 41mm Swatches, this one is only 9.85mm thick, and has a lug-to-lug length of 47.4mm. Pretty much anyone can wear these, but they fit better on larger wrists due to how springy and slightly stiff the rubber strap is. The difficulty comes in getting it fastened as the watch likes to slides round your wrist if you don't pull the strap in really tight.

A red plastic buckle probably wouldn't have been my choice for this design, maybe a black one (or a black metal one) would have looked better, but this is identical to the original Chrono-Tech. It's ridiculously easy to change the straps on these Swatch watches anyway, and the primary "Mondrian" colours on the dial and handset make it a bit of a strap monster.

Please note that none of us actually lived in a brightly-coloured environment in the 1980s, not even in the movies, and all those "80s bedrooms" you see online are simply designs created by fertile imaginations. Everyone's homes still looked like the early '70s until the end of the decade. There was cool stuff out there in some places, but nobody had any money for it until 10 years later, apart from some MTV VJs.

Ben sent this watch out as soon as I paid for it, just as he did with the Spaghetti Scameti, so it arrived extremely well-packaged and very quickly a couple of days before Christmas (actually on the 21st). It couldn't have been any faster or in any better condition, so I highly recommend buying watches from Ben's Watch Club whenever he has something to sell.

Yes, there were several tiny scratches on the side, of course, but I knew that when I bought it. With the watch being "bio-ceramic", it's easy to remove scratches to make it look new again. Some people use baking powder and a cloth, but I just used a small piece of the rough green part of a washing-up sponge to carefully smooth the scratches (while keeping the black case matt) rather than remove them entirely, because this watch has been seen all over the world and is a part of my YouTube viewing history now.

There were a couple of scratches on the crystal too, which I had a go at with PolyWatch, and of course, it didn't work (because PolyWatch is useless) but left more swirls, so I'll wait until I go to a real Swatch store one day next year and let them buff it properly for free.

Now I have one of these larger Swatch watches, I am forced to concede they they do tick very loudly when they are off your wrist. None of my other Swatch watches do this, so I'd always argued against it, but I think the overall quality may have gone down in recent years, which was matched with increased prices because that's a thing all the watch companies do now too.

Obviously this won't be my last Swatch, and you know I got another 34mm "Once Again" for Christmas which I'll review eventually. I'm not a Swatch "fan boy" by any stretch of the imagination, but I do like them.