As I begin to prepare for the strong possibility of doing a Sex Toy Education Workshop, hosted by a friend, I’m finding that there’s so much information I want to share and I don’t know if I can get it all in.

The first half of the Workshop will be spent talking about the various sex toy materials; their safety rating, their mating habits, their lube preference. The second half will be spent teaching them how to shop for sex toys online – which will include teaching them about reviews.

When I first started buying sex toys it was from places like Adam & Eve and MyPleasure. My husband actually found MP because I’d not been impressed with A&E’s stuff. But the problem with buying sex toys online 6 years ago was that the reviews existed solely on the sex toy retailer’s site. You didn’t know who was writing it, what they had to compare it to, what type of toys they liked or even if it was a real person. Even to this day there are a few sites that have onsite paragraph reviews that just seem iffy – too much praise for a toy that I and others found lacking. I’d say that the first $200 worth of sex toys ended up being disappointments. Sure, the expensive Rabbit was amazing until it died after not too many uses. The only toy that’s survived from my first year of sex toy buying (or rather said, pre-reviewing) was a powerful yet cheap ass “pocket rocket” vibe that had the right type of vibrations for me.

I wish I’d known not to buy jelly toys, that’s a no-brainer. I wish I’d known then about the vibe-in-disguise that is the massager types – Hitachi, Wahl, Acuvibe, etc.

So my question to all my readers, and even the seasoned reviewers, is what mistakes did you make when you bought your first toys? What do you know now that you wish you’d known then? What information could someone have given you that might have resulted in purchases that were not a colossal waste of money? Or, what types of toys/materials had you seen but been too wary to purchase and what information about them changed your mind for the better?