Best watch for small wrists

Why this one

Everybody shopping for a small wrist is given the wrong number. Case diameter tells you almost nothing: a 38 mm watch with long flat lugs will hang over the edge of your wrist while a 40 mm one with short turned-down lugs sits neatly. The number that decides it is lug-to-lug — the distance from the tip of one lug to the other — and if your wrist is under about 16.5 cm you want that figure under roughly 46 mm. This one measures 44.2 mm across the lugs on a 38 mm case, which is small enough to disappear on a narrow wrist and still read as a proper watch rather than a shrunken one. It is a genuine automatic, rated to 100 m, on the same 4R36 movement Seiko puts in watches costing considerably more, and it is the mid-size reissue of the SKX — the diver most people picture when they picture a Seiko. Two honest drawbacks. It is 12.1 mm thick, which is not thin: this is a diver-style case, so what it saves in width it partly spends in height, and under a tight shirt cuff you will notice. And the crystal is Hardlex, Seiko's hardened mineral glass, not sapphire — fine against knocks, less good against fine scratches.

What it beat

• Orient Bambino 38 mmDressier and thinner with a lovely domed crystal, but rated to 30 m — a watch you take off to wash up.
• Hamilton Khaki Field 38 mmBetter finished and the nicer object, at roughly double the price.
• Timex Marlin 34 mmThe smallest and prettiest of the four, and hand-wound only at 30 m. Charming rather than useful.
• Tissot Everytime 36 mmThinner and smarter under a cuff, but quartz at this money — no movement to speak of.

Specification