If you only ask one question before buying an intimate product, ask what it’s made of. Not what it does. Not how it’s designed. Not whether it has app control or seventeen vibration patterns. What it’s made of.
This sounds dramatic, and to most people it sounds like the kind of overcautious advice that gets passed around without anyone really understanding why. So let me explain why I’d actually ask this first, before anything else, every time.
The thing about porous materials
Materials in the intimate product category fall, broadly, into two camps: porous and non-porous. The distinction is not academic. It’s the most important fact about any product you’ll put into close contact with your body.
Porous materials have microscopic openings on the surface. You can’t see them — they’re far too small for that — but they’re there. Cheap rubber, jelly, PVC, and most of the soft plastics labeled “TPE” or “TPR” are porous. They feel pleasantly skin-like in the hand, which is part of why they got popular in the first place. They’re cheap to manufacture, easy to mold, soft to the touch. From a marketing perspective, they’re great.
The problem is that those microscopic openings collect things. They collect bacteria. They collect lubricant residue. They collect, over time, the micro-debris of every use the product has ever had. And no amount of soap and water reaches inside them. You can wash the surface, and you should. But the inside of a porous material, by definition, is not surface. It’s a network of tiny voids that will hold whatever was put in them.
This is not a hypothetical. There’s published research on this — porous adult products held cultivable bacteria after standard cleaning, in controlled studies. The takeaway isn’t “porous products are dangerous in the moment.” The takeaway is that they’re impossible to keep genuinely clean over time, which is a different problem and a worse one.
Why silicone is the answer
Medical-grade silicone is non-porous. The surface is the surface, all the way through. Soap and water reach every part of it. Bacteria can’t establish itself inside the material because there’s no inside for it to get into.
It also doesn’t off-gas, doesn’t degrade with normal use, doesn’t react chemically with skin, and tolerates warm water and gentle soap without breaking down. It can even be boiled (if the product is fully waterproof and motorless), which is a level of cleanability porous materials simply cannot offer.
The catch is that medical-grade silicone is more expensive to manufacture than porous alternatives, and slightly harder to mold to certain shapes. This is why budget products almost always use porous materials. The economics push manufacturers toward what’s cheap, and the marketing language obscures the difference. “Body-safe” is a phrase that gets applied to materials that fail the simplest test — can this be properly cleaned, ever — and the customer often doesn’t know the difference.
The way to verify is to read the actual material name on the product page. If it says “100% medical-grade silicone” or “FDA-grade silicone,” good. If it says anything else — or nothing specific at all — assume porous until proven otherwise.
What “FDA-grade” actually means
The phrase shows up in marketing constantly, and it’s worth understanding what’s behind it. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration maintains a regulation, 21 CFR 177.2600, that defines requirements for rubber articles intended for repeated use in contact with food. The standards cover things like extractable residue limits — what can leach out of the material under specified conditions.
This isn’t a sex-toy-specific regulation. It’s a food-contact regulation. But silicones manufactured to meet 21 CFR 177.2600 are generally considered safe for prolonged skin contact in adjacent applications, including medical devices and intimate products. When a brand says their silicone is “FDA-grade,” what they’re claiming is that the material they sourced meets these published standards.
The relevant adjacent standard is the more recent ISO 3533, published in 2021, which is the first international standard specifically written for the safety of sex toys. It addresses materials, mechanical safety, and hygienic design. The standard isn’t yet ubiquitously certified — many brands reference it as a design target without holding formal certification — but the existence of the standard at all is a useful sign that the industry is finally professionalizing.
Reputable manufacturers will keep certification documents from their silicone supplier on file, and a serious brand will share them on request. If a customer service team is unable or unwilling to tell you where their silicone comes from and what it’s certified for, that itself is information.
How to actually clean what you bought
Once you have a silicone product, keeping it clean is straightforward, which is one of the practical advantages of the material. Warm water, a small amount of mild unscented soap, and a thorough rinse — that’s it for routine cleaning. The whole process takes less than two minutes and should happen after every use.
For deeper cleaning, fully waterproof silicone products can be boiled for three to five minutes (only motorless designs, only if the product page confirms it’s safe). A 10% bleach solution — one part household bleach to nine parts water, with a thorough rinse afterward — works for products you can’t boil. There are also dedicated toy cleaners on the market that are formulated to not damage silicone, if you want something pre-mixed.
The thing to avoid is silicone-on-silicone contact with lubricants. Silicone-based lubes can react with silicone toys over time, leaving the surface tacky or pitted. Water-based lube is the universal safe choice and works fine for almost every situation. This is one of those quiet rules that nobody tells you and then you wonder why your toy looks weird six months in.
Phthalates, BPA, and the other concerns
The two chemical concerns most often raised are phthalates and bisphenol-A (BPA). Both are plasticizers — chemicals added to plastics to make them softer, more flexible, more pleasant to handle. Both have been studied extensively for endocrine effects, and the literature has been concerning enough that responsible manufacturers in many product categories have phased them out.
Modern, well-made silicone products don’t contain either. They don’t need to — silicone has its own structural integrity and doesn’t require plasticizers to feel good. The fact that you still see phthalate-free and BPA-free called out as features is a legacy of how widespread these compounds used to be in cheap rubber alternatives.
Latex is a separate issue. It’s not toxic; it’s allergenic for a meaningful percentage of the population. Latex-free, again, is more about being inclusive than about anything being inherently dangerous in the material itself.
The simple version
If you don’t want to remember any of this, remember three things.
One: medical-grade silicone is the standard you want.
Two: vague material descriptions on a product page are a red flag — if a brand can’t tell you what something is made of, assume the worst case.
Three: a quality silicone product, treated reasonably, lasts five to ten years. A porous-material product is degrading the day you take it out of the box, and it’s been degrading the whole time it sat in storage. The price difference, amortized over the lifespan, isn’t a price difference at all.
This is the question I’d ask before any other. Not what does it do, not how does it work — what is it made of. Everything else builds on the answer.