Basically, the international standards organization took them all away, to keep for themselves! Let’s get them, guys!

Only kidding … actually, the ISO decided that the ‘waterproof’ label was misleading to consumers, and decided that the best way to protect you from making a decision based on false information was to simply take the label away. The reasoning behind this is that if a watch was ‘waterproof’, you should be able to leave it sitting in your toilet cistern while you go on holidays (to protect against thieves, of course!), and when you come back, it would be in perfect working order. Strangely enough, watch manufacturers don’t employ this quality control test as standard practice! Basically, they subject a watch to underwater conditions at increasing pressures, but only for a limited amount of time. Then, when water begins to creep into the mechanisms, that is the limit of its water resistance – hence the ‘water-resistant to 30ft / 50 ft / 75 ft’ label on watches.

Since the test doesn’t include subjecting watches to varying pressures, as might happen even in shallow dives where you go up and down within less than thirty feet, or any number of other environmental factors like testing in both salt and fresh water, testing along with different water temperatures, as well as testing in conjunction with physical shocks (when you misjudge the wall while swimming and bang your watch into it, for example), these tests can’t really qualify a manufacturer to say that their watch is waterproof. There really has to be a qualifying statement behind that…

So you see, the reason you cannot buy a waterproof watch anymore is because you never really could buy a waterproof watch!