Admit it: you cried at Coco. Of course you did.

Halloween might be all fancy dress and Beggar's Night. The real holiday, Dia de Muertos, is also a celebration, albeit one that is a bit more profound. It's the day that families, mainly but not exclusively in Mexico, honour their deceased relatives with altars and calaveras.

The horology world, conscious as it is of the passage of time, enthusiastically gets into the muertos spirit; watch faces make a pretty good palette for a skull (as Richard Mille fans can attest). So here are five watches to remind us that time, in fact, waits for no one.

The Camden Watch Company is, not surprisingly, based in the London borough of Camden, though it also has a store in Greenwich (the place where all time began). The brand channels the Camden motto well: 'Non Sibi Sed Toti,' or 'Not For One But For All.' Camden watches are affordable and, unlike many independent brands, they offer an extensive selection of women's watches.

This particular watch leans toward the Victorian Memento Mori tradition ("remember you must die," more on that in a minute) than Dia de Muertos, but in the end, they both get us to the same place, amiright?

So let's go there in style. With a 29 mm women's and a 39 mm men's watch, there aren't many wrists where these won't look good. And look good they do, with Roman numerals and Victorian styling. And don’t worry, these watches aren't really macabre - they're YOLO all the way.

27mm (ladies) and 39mm (men's) stainless steel PVD black-plated case, Japanese quartz movement, with a choice of straps.

Timex's historic slogan, 'it takes a licking and keeps on ticking,' suggests a certain indestructibility. So it might be ironic, in the Alanis Morrisette sense of getting irony wrong, that the same watch company produces a watch to remind you that, in fact, you are not.

So it is with the Weekender Day of the Dead. Timex goes full calavera here, with a sugar skull on the dial and floral accents. Making it even more impressive is the full-lume Indiglo backlight, which makes the entire watch face glow in the dark.

It's only rated to 50 metres, but we're okay with that: we only need to go down 6 feet after all. And with a Timex quartz movement, like your hair and nails, it's gonna go on long after you do.

Memento Mori - 'remember you must die' goes back a ways. King Solomon gave us the first glimpse in Ecclesiastes ('all life is vanity!'). Later, playwrights (think Hamlet speaking to Yorrick's noggin') and Baroque artists (like Champaigne and Holbein the Younger) began to work skulls into their still-lifes, all saying what Mick Jagger would say much later: time waits for no one, and it won't wait for us.

But hey! You didn't come here for a reminder of your struggles with Art History, English Lit, and Religious Studies; you're here for watches. The Accurate is delightfully simple: it tells you the time, and it tells you that other thing. As for the name, it fits: it runs on a Swiss Ronda 513, which is accurate to within -10/+20 seconds per month, or anywhere from 2 minutes slow to 4 minutes fast after a year.

As for the message: we see it as a positive, as if the watch is channelling that quote from The Shawshank Redemption (and you have seen Shawshank, right?):

'Time to get busy livin', says Mr Jones.

37mm stainless steel, PVD-coated case, 46mm lug-to-lug, Ronda 513 quartz movement, leather strap, unapologetically accurate.

We find Undone watches… confusing. They have a collab with Hello Kitty (!) and another with the Manta Trust, which protects manta rays. A collab with the virtual YouTube company Hololive, and another with the Formula 1 team Williams. A Popeye watch that comes in a spinach can, and a watch called the Cali 420 Automatic, which comes in a can of, um, the ‘devil's lettuce’.

Editor's Note: The cans ONLY contain watches. ONLY.

So we were like, ‘Pick a lane?’ But then we saw this watch and thought, ‘Okay, maybe don't.’ Because this one is charming. It's substantial too, with a stainless steel case, hardened K1 crystal, and a Seiko VK64 movement.

The dial features a calavera painted in fluorescent colours, and the case back bears the inscription "Todos Somos Calaveras" — "We Are All Skeletons" — a quote from legendary Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada Aguilar, creator of the iconic La Calavera Catrina.

It doesn't get more Day of the Dead than this.

40mm case, 47mm lug-to-lug, VK64 meca-quartz movement, fluorescent dial that glows in the dark.

We've gone way out of our lane here, but we're all about discovery at Watch500, even if that discovery sets us back 32 large. (Editor's Note: we didn't do that.) And with this watch, it's on brief, of course, but also because the designer, Fiona Kruger, is non-stop interesting. Scottish, raised in France, she moved to Mexico City, where she experienced Dia de los Muertos firsthand.

As for the watch itself, it's manufactured by L'Epee 1839, which crafts remarkably clever, intricate, and expensive items, including these. Would we ever own one? Probably not No. Is it fun to admire from a distance while contemplating our mortality? It is indeed.

57.4mm (length), 41mm (width), hand-painted, stainless steel skull case; TT738 automatic movement, date window in the middle of the skull's forehead.

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