SPOTLIGHT ON: TAG Heuer Formula 1 Ladies Quartz Watch

362.508

I think it's fair to say that my wife is rather taken with her new orange and grey 'classic' Formula 1 (at least judging by the number of times I've seen it on her wrist over the past couple of weeks at any rate...) but she still doesn't have a proper, original 'resin case' model. Over the weekend she started looking on eBay again and came across a number of models including this very cool 362.508 from a seller in Japan. 

Incidentally, this first picture (above) isn't from the eBay listing, it's from a different website and I'll come back to that later. It's just that I always try and find a 'head-on' shot for the top of my blog posts and the eBay listing didn't really have one.

This picture shows of the colours of the watch much better, and while the green of the resin strap doesn't exactly match the tone on the bezel, I think it's close enough that it doesn't look jarring. I actually really like this color combination even though it's a bit of an odd one; usually TAG Heuer tended to choose contrasting colours rather than (colour wheel) adjacent ones for their first generation Formula 1 series watches. The TAG Heuer logo, white hands and hour markers really stand out against the blue dial, as do the minute markings on the green resin bezel.

As ever my wife wanted me to look at the listing for her as I tend to spot things that she doesn't, and while on the face of it this watch looks in pretty good condition, after a few minutes of looking really closely I unfortunately spotted a little problem. In one of the pictures I noticed a small mark on the glass and went through the other pictures to see if it was apparent whether it was a scratch or possibly dust, and then finally when I came to the picture below I realised that the glass is actually chipped.

I feel like this is a bit sneaky, since it really looks like they've taken a picture to show this flaw, but they haven't mentioned it in the description. So it looks like they know there's an issue there but they don't want to draw your attention to it, but because they've shown it they've covered their ass if you then complain about it as they can 'honestly' say the chip was clearly apparent in the listing photos...

It's a real shame as the price was good (Japan seems to be the place to go for many early TAG Heuer models, with great prices offered - as long as you take into account the carriage and potential customs charges of course) and otherwise the watch looks pretty decent. The listing price was for £145, plus £22 carriage to the UK. I think it would also be liable for another £30 of customs duty, but it would still come in under £200, which is pretty reasonable when you see the prices UK sellers sometimes charge for unusual colour schemes like this one.

Naturally my wife was a bit disappointed, so I had a bit of a search but the only alternative I could find was an old listing on 'The Luxury Closet' website (a company based in a hotel in Dubai, believe it or not) and that was showing as 'Sold Out'. A bit of a difference in the price though, they had it 'On Sale' at £425 down from (cough) £964! What did this watch cost in the late 80s, about £130? If that...

And so the purchase came to a crashing halt, but I shall keep looking out for her for cool resin-cased Formula 1's, she's definitely got the bug for these fun little watches!