Glamourpussy

When I saw this Glamour box-set of seven – yes seven! – varied sex toys, I was really impressed, and thought my luck was in! There was a plain silver vibrator with additional G-Spot stimulator sheath, a dildo, love egg, love balls, anal beads and a cock ring. There was also a sachet of lube and the all-important batteries, a necessary inclusion to any electric toy package – after all, there’s nothing more frustrating than a pack of sex toys without the means to make them work! The selection looked well thought out, and the presentation was great: silver, glittery, and great fun. It was slightly hen-party tacky, but that was also part of the appeal – I like a sex toy that doesn’t take itself too seriously, so seven sex toys has got to be seven times as much fun, right?!

The Glamour Pur Collection

Sometimes with a big collection of toys you can imagine a female partner feeling over-awed or swamped by the sheer size of the dildos/ bum toys/ etc, and she might like to veto one or two of the items before trying them with her male partner, but that wasn’t the case with this range. Personally I felt more than comfortable trying all the toys out with my husband – the selection wasn’t too intimidating, and it was a good box-set to explore together straight-off the bat.

The vibrator was your standard 3-speed vibe that’s probably been the same since 1970s, which was disappointing, as you’d hope vibrators have evolved since then – which they certainly have! Maybe here it was a case of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. The vibrator wasn’t loud, but then it wasn’t particularly effective either!

The G-Spot stimulator sheath which slipped over the vibrator was a disappointment: imagine putting a condom on and it only coming three-quarters of the way down your partner’s penis! Not a good look. And not particularly sexy on a vibrator either.

The same went for the dildo, which size-wise came way shy of my (admittedly unusually well-hung) husband’s cock. But in that respect – in its favour – it wasn’t a threatening size, and I do appreciate that not everyone’s a ‘size queen’ like me! Not only did it lack in girth, but it was too short to comfortably hold manually inside you vaginally. It needed to be a good couple of inches longer so that you could hold it in your hand and still feel it was secure inside you – and get some good leverage to use it against your G-spot. It might be better used as an anal toy for someone who’s moving up to a larger size butt-plug, but not quite ready for real anal sex yet. That said: it didn’t have that all-important butt-plug base to stop it from being sucked up by your sphincter, so maybe it wouldn’t actually be appropriate for bum-play after all…

The Love Egg was cute and space-age silver, with four speeds, and the buzz on high speed was really impressive! It would have been better clad in nitrile or some such similar phthalate-free plastic-y type-material, as the join/ seam running around the Love Egg was, well, unseemly, and not very hygienic either! Before using a specially-designed hygiene spray, I like to give my sex toys a good wash first, but I was uncomfortable using water on this toy for fear that the join would let water into the engine. Moreover, the vibrations kept cutting out during use, and in fact the love egg finally stopped working altogether – a real disappointment!

It seemed to be a design fault due to how the wire (connecting the Love Egg to the battery/ control pack) was positioned as it came out of the Egg. When we moved position it seemed to work again. From personal experience this isn’t an unusual fault for a Love Egg, but that doesn’t make it OK – especially if you’re using something brand new for the very first time! And that wasn’t the only issue: the battery/ control pack itself was also faulty, and despite us rejigging the brand-new batteries every now and again to make sure that there wasn’t a loose connection, the battery/ control pack wouldn’t let us adjust speed unless it felt like it! It seemed to jam somewhere inside: a real disappointment that neither the egg itself nor the battery/ control pack it was attached to worked properly. Nul points, mes amis!

The Love Balls were a good weight, attractive and silver, but similar to the Love Egg it was lacking a hygienic cover, and again the toy would have been better encased in nitrile or something similar so that the seam/ join was completely covered and waterproof, so easier to clean, and more smooth-looking. Still, the Love Balls did the job, and would be good for any mum who needs to give her pelvic floor muscles a workout, or for any woman to wear at work, for example, to make her day pass a bit more pleasurably!

The anal beads were standard plastic anal beads, but with a fun, glittery silver finish which looked great. My husband had a secret solo go without me, and was a very happy man. Personally I would have included a butt plug instead of anal beads, but then I guess the Love Egg and dildo were supposed to cover that angle – literally!

The cock ring was cute and non-threatening for men, but whether you could get a guy to actually wear one, I couldn’t say: he might have liked the anal beads, but my husband took one look at this cock ring and laughed out loud. Maybe it wasn’t manly enough – it was glittery and silver, after all! It was however nice and flexible/ stretchy, and as it’s two-tiered (so it sits quite deep on the shaft), it might be handy to use it to stop your man’s cock from penetrating you too deeply during sex.

The sachet of Lube was a useful inclusion – it would have been a helpful introduction for lube novices to see how much difference Lube can make, and I thought it was a nice touch to include it in the toy assortment. What was missing, however, were image-based instructions for those who aren’t sure what goes where – this assortment of toys came with no practical instructions whatsoever, and I’m sure not everyone is equally clued-up in mutual sexual and self-pleasure as me and ‘im!

This is a great collection of toys to use with a partner: you don’t have to go it alone here, get your man involved! In my opinion, its unique selling point is that that there are items here for both men and women to enjoy alone or together. And everyone knows it’s always better to share…

A version of this text appeared on the Sex Toy Testers Website

Whilst writing this text I listened to the following on Spotify:

Roots Manuva – 4everevolution (Kinda poppy, but with deep enough basslines to hook you right in, and top lyrics to accompany them – as always)

Brett Anderson – Black Rainbows (This reminded me not just of Suede, obviously, but also something else that has momentarily escaped me. I’ll be back to correct this sometime soon when I get the thought back!)