In Review: The Swatch SCUBAQUA MEDUSAE
The Swatch SCUBAQUA collection feels like the company remembering what it does best. To understand what that means, let’s talk a little about the history of Swatch.
Swatch was born in 1983, at a moment when the Swiss watch industry looked close to collapse. Cheap quartz watches from Japan, especially from brands like Seiko and Citizen, had gutted the traditional Swiss market during the 1970s. Many Swiss firms were overloaded with costs and stuck making complicated mechanical watches while consumers were buying inexpensive battery-powered models instead.
The new company emerged from a restructuring effort led by Nicolas G. Hayek, who helped merge two struggling Swiss watch groups, ASUAG and SSIH, into what later became the Swatch Group. Engineers including Elmar Mock and Jacques Müller worked on a radically simple idea: a Swiss-made quartz watch built with far fewer parts, housed in plastic, cheap to manufacture, and sold as a fashion object rather than a lifelong heirloom.
The first Swatch collection launched in Zurich on March 1, 1983. The watches were colorful, lightweight, and intentionally playful. Instead of treating a watch as jewelry or precision machinery alone, Swatch treated it as something closer to clothing, something people could swap depending on mood or style. That idea changed the business.
Swatch helped pull the Swiss watch industry out of the so-called Quartz Crisis. The profits from the inexpensive plastic watches gave the larger group room to preserve and rebuild traditional Swiss brands including Omega, Longines, and Tissot. By the late 1990s, the company formally became the Swatch Group, one of the largest watch conglomerates in the world.
And what’s the connection to the ocean? The story goes that Hayek was on the beach and saw hundreds of young people playing in the water. He noticed that, despite an endless number of waterproof watches available, no one was wearing any. He decided to make Swatch colorful and waterproof in order to ensure that beachgoers could tell the time and, presumably, look cool. The first waterproof Swatch, the Scuba 200, is the definitive progenitor of the SCUBAQUA line.
This, then, brings us to the decidedly cool SCUBAQUA.
The Watch
These are Swatches to the core. The watches are bright, playful, slightly strange, and completely unconcerned with looking serious. Inspired by jellyfish and other undersea creatures and built around translucent cases and loud colors, the SCUBAQUA line brings back the spirit of the old Swatch Scuba watches from the 1990s while updating the formula with new materials and a larger, more modern case.
We tested the blue-green Medusae model with a candy colored green band — it literally looks edible — and a clear case that reminds me of an old Bondi Blue iMac from the late 1990s.
The case combines matte Bioceramic with transparent biosourced material derived from castor oil, creating what Swatch calls a “jelly effect.” The transparent dial exposes the quartz movement underneath, giving the watches a toy-like charm that somehow still works as proper dive-inspired gear. At 44mm wide, the watches are large, but the lightweight construction and silicone strap keep them comfortable on the wrist.
Every model takes its name and color palette from a different jellyfish species. The collection ranges from the stark black Black Sea Nettle to the glowing yellow Egg Yolk and the electric blue Blue Fire. Newer additions, including Medusae, Sea Wasp, Pacific Sea Nettle, and Flower Hat, push the color combinations even further into beach-watch territory.
The details are pure Swatch. The crown sits unusually at 10 o’clock, partly for comfort and partly because it looks cool. The hands and markers glow in the dark, water resistance is rated to 10 bar or 100 meters, and some models now include Swatch Pay for contactless payments. Basically, you’re getting something on par with a Seiko diver but for a mere $155, a great price for such a large and usable watch.
The watch even has a readable diving bezel that matches the watch’s playful style. Interestingly the movement, a standard watch ETA quartz, has a second position for what I suspect is a date wheel. Sadly, they didn’t add that to this model. Further, the movement is non hacking so you can’t synchronize your watches before taking tequila shots on the beach.
This is not a hard-core dive watch pretending to belong beside a Submariner or Fifty Fathoms. It’s a summer watch or a watch for someone who misses when Swatch was willing to be weird and colorful without turning everything into a limited-edition collaboration stunt. The SCUBAQUA collection succeeds because it remembers that watches can still be fun.
I’m not a quartz guy but this thing has won my heart. It’s a great addition to the Swatch canon and definitely worth the price of admission. I could see this as a teenager’s first watch or a tool watch for someone beating around a sailboat or hitting the depths snorkeling. The bottom line is if you don’t want to wear your Rolex or Omega to the beach, you can very easily slap this to your wrist, check the time, and enjoy your day knowing that your weird little Swatch will let you know when it’s time for lunch.