You’ve opened up your sex toy drawer in search of your favourite dildo… only to find that it has apparently liquefied in your absence. It’s now deformed, slimy, sticky, or welded irreversibly to your other toys.
This has happened even though you stored your toys in a place that was:
Why has this happened to you?
Having a sex toy “melt” like this is actually a fairly common experience. Here’s why it happens, what you should do if it does happen, and how you can prevent it.
Sex toys are made from a range of different materials, including silicone, rubber, PVC, plastic, metal, and “jelly”. Some of these materials are, alas, more reactive than others.
If you leave reactive toys in contact with one another (or even close to one another) they may do what they do best and react. They usually do this by melting, exuding grease or oil, or becoming discoloured.
Materials that often react when stored together include:
Silicone, on the other hand, is wonderfully nonreactive, meaning that silicone toys (so long as they are pure silicone with nothing else mixed in) will never melt or deform. Hurrah!
Other good (but less common) nonreactive toy materials include:
If you’ve got a toy that you think is made from one of the materials listed above… but it has still melted, this is most likely because it’s actually not made from the material you think it is. It may have had softeners, colours, texturisers or other additives snuck in during the manufacturing process, turning that lovely nonreactive toy into something much more melty.
Some people report that using a silicone lube with a silicone toy can also cause melting or deformation. If this happens, it again usually means that the toy was not pure silicone in the first place, or that the lube has some funky ingredients.
Oilbased lubes are known to cause damage to sex toys made from a few different materials.
Because of these issues, people are often advised to:
This basically means sticking to a decent waterbased lube (like this one) all the time. And why wouldn’t you? Waterbased lube is excellent, and comes in every formulation imaginable – for oral, for anal, for everyday use.
The short answer to this is: throw them out. And, while you’re at it, throw out any toys that they melted onto as well.
In many cases, materials that melt are toxic, and may contain substances that are harmful or cancercausing. Once they’ve melted the risk that you’ll have an unpleasant reaction to them is significantly higher.
And, to compound that, they’ll also be kinda sticky – and thus not much fun to play with even if you did want to.
You might be able to return a melty toy to the retailer, but this is usually more effort than it’s worth. Yes, it’s unfair that they told you the product was silicone when it obviously isn’t… but getting them to admit fault and accept a return will require some effort.
There are three things you can do to avoid having to deal with a melted toy. I present them here in order of preference.
If you buy toys that are made from pure silicone, stainless steel, glass, or any other nonreactive material the problem of melting toys goes away. You can throw all your toys into a big box under the bed and never worry about it again. Hurrah.
To make shopping simple, everything sold by SheVibe is made from materials that are safe and nonreactive. Other retailers are a bit more patchwork, but you can read more about how to evaluate potential purchases here.
If you don’t want to say goodbye to your jelly or rubberbased toys just yet, you can prevent them from melting by storing them separately from one another. You can do this by putting them in different drawers, wrapping each toy in a sock, or storing them in neat little satin bags.
This isn’t an ideal solution, but if you’re not prepared to throw out your toys and buy silicone ones, it’ll have to do.
To prevent problems with incompatible lube, you can also just stick to waterbased lube all the time. Again, this isn’t an ideal solution – the best solution is to throw out any toys made from reactive materials and buy better ones. But if for any reason you don’t want to do that, sticking to waterbased lubes will help you avoid a melty dildo.
