How to Care for a Luxury Watch

A mechanical watch is one of the few luxury objects designed to outlive its owner, provided it is looked after with something close to the attention it deserves. Most of the damage done to good watches happens not through dramatic accidents but through small, accumulated neglect — years without servicing, a strap left unchanged until it cracks, a case wiped with the wrong cloth. None of it is complicated to avoid.

The Basics of Daily Care

Anyone wondering how to care for a watch day to day should start with habits rather than products. Wipe the case and bracelet after wear, particularly in a humid climate, where salt from perspiration accelerates wear on both metal and leather. Avoid magnets — speakers, phone cases, certain bag clasps — which can throw off a mechanical movement’s accuracy considerably, sometimes without any obvious external sign that damage has occurred. And resist the urge to adjust the date function during the hours a watch’s internal mechanism is mid-cycle changing it, typically between roughly 9pm and 3am, since forcing the date wheel during this window is a common and entirely avoidable cause of internal damage.

Understanding What’s Actually Inside

Caring properly for a watch is considerably easier once you understand, even at a basic level, what the movement is doing — how a mainspring stores energy, why an automatic watch needs regular wrist time or a winder to stay accurate, what actually happens during a service. A grounding in the fundamentals, laid out in Understanding Watch Movements: A Primer, turns servicing from a mysterious, occasionally intimidating expense into a predictable part of ownership rather than a surprise.

The Watch Servicing Guide Nobody Reads Until Something Goes Wrong

Most manufacturers recommend a full service every four to six years, though this varies by brand and movement type, and the interval matters more than owners typically assume. A service at this stage involves fully disassembling the movement, cleaning every component, replacing worn parts, re-lubricating, and testing accuracy and water resistance before reassembly — considerably more involved than a quick clean. Skipping it doesn’t save money; it defers a larger repair bill, since worn components left unaddressed tend to damage the parts around them, turning a routine service into a full movement rebuild.

Signs a Watch Needs Attention Sooner

• Noticeable loss or gain in accuracy — more than a few seconds a day drifting beyond what’s normal for the movement.
• Moisture or condensation visible under the crystal, a sign the water resistance has failed and needs immediate attention before rust sets in.
• A power reserve that seems to be shortening over time on an automatic watch worn regularly.

Any thorough watch servicing guide should stress that gaskets, which maintain water resistance, degrade with age regardless of how carefully a watch is otherwise treated — meaning even a watch that’s never worn diving should have its water resistance tested periodically if it’s ever exposed to moisture at all.

Storage Between Wears

A watch not worn regularly still needs consideration. Automatic watches left stationary for more than a day or two will simply stop, which is harmless in itself, but restarting one after months of dormancy without occasionally winding or wearing it can leave lubricants unevenly distributed. A watch winder solves this for a heavily automatic collection, though it’s an unnecessary expense for a single watch worn in rotation with only one or two others — simply hand-winding briefly and resetting the time before wearing does the job just as well.

“The watches that come in worst for repair are never the ones that were dropped,” one watchmaker told us. “They’re the ones that were just quietly ignored for fifteen years.”

Straps, Bracelets and the Small Stuff

Leather straps should be rotated if worn daily, allowed to dry out between wears rather than trapped against skin constantly, and replaced well before they crack rather than after. Metal bracelets benefit from an occasional professional cleaning to clear out the dust and skin oil that accumulate between links, which over time can accelerate wear at the joints. None of this requires specialist tools or excessive cost — mostly attention, and a willingness to address small issues before they become larger ones.

Choosing Who Services It

Not every watchmaker is equally qualified to work on every brand, and this matters more than owners often assume. Manufacturer-authorised service centres carry the specific training, parts and diagnostic tools for a given brand’s movements, and are generally the safest choice for a watch still under warranty or one carrying significant value. Independent watchmakers, particularly those specialising in vintage or discontinued calibres, can offer comparable quality at a lower cost and often a faster turnaround, though it is worth confirming their specific experience with the movement in question before handing over a piece with genuine sentimental or financial value. Asking to see examples of previous work, or checking reviews specific to the watchmaker rather than a general repair shop, is a reasonable and increasingly common request.

Keeping a simple record of service dates, whoever performs the work, makes future maintenance considerably easier to plan and gives any future buyer, should the watch ever be sold, a documented history that meaningfully supports its value. Retaining the original box and papers alongside this service record, while not strictly necessary for the watch to function well, meaningfully supports resale value down the line and is worth the modest effort of simply not discarding them.

Why the Effort Is Worth It

A well-maintained mechanical watch is one of the rare objects that appreciates in character with age rather than simply degrading — the case picks up a patina, the movement, if serviced properly, keeps running with the same accuracy it had new. This is part of the argument behind The Case for One Very Good Watch over several mediocre ones, and it’s equally relevant to anyone weighing vintage against modern — a vintage piece is only as good as the care it received over the decades before you owned it. Treat maintenance as part of the purchase, not an afterthought, and a good watch, chosen properly from the pieces covered across Style & Watches, really can last a lifetime, and quite possibly longer.