What’s in your sex toy? Good question. A lot of people aren’t aware that there are absolutely NO regulations about the materials that pleasure products can be made of. There is no official policy of truth in labeling when it comes to pleasure products. In fact, products clearly designed for intimate, sexual use aren’t even labelled at all in most cases.

Right now there’s a “buyer beware” climate in the sex toy industry… but most buyers haven’t been warned about it. We believe this climate arises from cultural shame regarding sexuality, and a mainstream adult industry that often prioritizes profits over people.

When Smitten Kitten opened in 2003, we learned the hard way about the prevalence of toxic toys in our industry. (Watch our video and learn more about our run in with toxic toys.) In 2005 we started BADVIBES.ORG, and in 2006 we decided that we needed hard proof about the dangerous chemicals in some of the most popular toys.

We sent a variety of sex toys from some of the largest manufacturers to an independent chemical testing lab in California and had them tested and reverse engineered by a chemist in a laboratory. The results of these deformulation tests were shocking, and affront to the consumer public.

The documents below are scanned images of the results from our 2006 round of testing.

In 2014 we created another jar of questionable toys that exhibited physical properties consistent with the phthalate-rich toys from our first batch. We ordered two of each of these toys, jarred one set and sent the others to be deformulated by the same lab.  Here are some photos of those toys, and the results of their deformulation tests.

TOYS & PACKAGING

THE JAR & VISUALLY OBSERVABLE CHANGES

TEST RESULTS

2014 results – click for a pdf of the deformulation test results for these toys.