Watch Gunk

 One of the old sayings is "out of sight out of mind" and this really applies to almost everything, especially gunk that gets into places you almost never see.

For one reason or another I've always had watches which allow me to see between the strap / band / bracelet and the watch. I've always avoided bracelets which have had covers such as this:

and yes, that's my watch and my bracelet ... but that's a subject for another post. Instead I prefer bracelets like this:

which are more open and to me honest in what they are, not trying to pretend to be something more and give the impress that the bracelet and watch are a single thing.

This is also important because gunk gets in to crevices and forms a film and starts to attack stuff (like metal, like seals ... this is an excellent example from Hodinkee

Festy is it not?

Now my Garmin training watch is something a bit like that, but I have to change the battery every few months so I always have opportunity to clean it, however it does get like this which can be seen when you pull the silicon cover off:

and

while not as festy as the watch above from Hodinkee its still hardly hygenic.

Now if you're the kind of person who never washes then this is all probably de-rigueur for you, but that's probably not most of us.

That's why I like to have a watch band that makes it easy to keep clean in my daily wear.

indeed you can see this bracelet even has tool-less spring bars and my watch has drilled lugs (very nice) making springbar removal even easier.

Heck even my old faithful has this style of easy to keep clean bracelet with no gunk catchers.

So for tips on how to clean your watch (its pretty simple really) you may as well pop over to the Hodinkee site that I poached that image from and have a quick read.

Lastly as I said at the start this sort of gunk gets into and indeed grows in places like you wouldn't believe ... have a look inside a typical rotating head toothbrush ... after I found this I put mine in a small jar of alcohol (vodka) every day (I keep a small jar by the sink).

Hopefully you can avoid one more place of gunk in your life now.