Silicone Toy Care and Craft
Silicone rewards a little attention. Give a piece the care it asks for and it will still be with you long after most things have gone. What follows is everything I would tell a friend: washing, storing, which lubricants to trust, what genuinely destroys a toy, and at the end, how ours are made and why yours will be unlike anyone else's.
Before you begin
Give it a wash when it arrives, clean though it already is. Mild unscented soap in warm water, rinsed well, then dried right through.
Routine cleaning
Clean it either side of every use, without exception. Warm water, a mild unscented soap, hands rather than a sponge or flannel, because those carry bacteria themselves. Textures and the area around the base need the most attention, since residue collects there.
Leave the strong stuff alone. There is no call for antibacterial handwash, washing-up liquid, alcohol gel or scouring cleaners, and each can leave a residue behind or take the life out of the finish. Nothing about silicone demands them. Soap and water covers it entirely.
A deeper clean
Where a piece is solid silicone throughout, boiling water for a few minutes works, as does a hot dishwasher cycle without detergent. Allow it to come back to room temperature by itself.
This does not apply to squirting or ejaculating pieces, nor to anything fitted with a suction cup, a moving component or electronics. Heat will ruin or detach them. Uncertain about yours? Ask before you boil anything, or keep to soap and water, which handles everyday cleaning perfectly well.
Storage
- Bone dry before it is put away. Moisture left behind causes the trouble, not the material.
- Somewhere dry, clean and shaded from sunlight.
- Separate your pieces from each other. Silicone can rest against itself indefinitely, yet differing silicones and blends may react at the point of contact and leave marks that never come out.
- Keep other brands well away, above all vinyl, jelly, rubber and anything of unknown composition. Those degrade silicone, and there is no undoing it.
- Cotton bags, clean towels and individual boxes all serve. A sealed bag suits too, provided the piece is thoroughly dry first.
- Expect lint to find it. That is appearance rather than hygiene, and a rinse deals with it.
Choosing a lubricant
Water-based is the one to use. It suits silicone perfectly, washes off without trace, and damages nothing.
Silicone-based must be avoided. A silicone lubricant bonds with a silicone toy and eats into the surface. The process is gradual, permanent, and outside any warranty. More good pieces are lost this way than to anything else.
Oil-based lubricants leave silicone unharmed, but they resist rinsing, they leave behind a film that catches residue, and they ruin latex. Where a condom is involved, rule them out.
Give these a wide berth:
- Every silicone-based lubricant, hybrids containing silicone included
- Baby oil, petroleum jelly, coconut and olive oil, plus anything else from a kitchen cupboard
- Creams, moisturisers and body butter
- Food-based products of any sort. Sugar and food oil spoil and draw insects, which stops being theoretical the moment a toy has been stored for a season
Curious about something absent from this list? Dab a little onto the base, wait twenty-four hours, then decide.
The things that cause damage
- Silicone lubricant, per the section above. Nothing else comes close.
- Storage contact with a toy whose material you cannot identify.
- Fingernails, teeth, animals. The material resists a great deal, but a nick becomes a tear, and tears travel.
- Extended sunlight, which drains the colour.
- Serious cold, which temporarily hardens silicone and leaves it likelier to tear. Let a chilled piece warm through first.
Knowing when to stop
A glance and a run of the fingers beforehand is all it takes. Set a piece aside once you find a tear, a split, a nick, or an area that has turned tacky and will not wash clean. Damaged surfaces cannot be cleaned properly, and small tears never remain small.
No two the same
Each Wyrm's Own piece is cast individually, so identical results are impossible. Fades settle differently. Marbling takes its own route. A pair poured the same afternoon from the same colours will read as siblings, not as copies.
We consider that a feature, not an imperfection. What you see on a product page is representative, and what reaches you will carry its own personality. Should yours arrive strikingly far from what you had in mind, get in touch and I will resolve it.
Made by hand
Each sculpt starts life as an original design, modelled from scratch rather than derived from something existing. From the design comes a master, and from the master come the moulds. Both the designs and the tooling are ours, which is the reason these forms appear nowhere else and the reason they bear our claw.
Wyrm's Own is poured by hand thereafter, batch by small batch. The silicone is blended and coloured for that single pour, degassed so the air is pulled back out, cast, cured completely, then released, trimmed and inspected by hand ahead of packing.
Because of that degassing, no bubbles will appear anywhere through the shaft or body of your piece. Occasionally one comes to rest in the flat of the base, the last place the silicone settles. Nothing touches you there, performance and cleaning are unaffected, and it cannot spread. Beyond that it is a defect rather than a characteristic, and I would like to hear about it.
All of this takes longer than production at scale, which is precisely why the collection exists in the quantities it does, and why a piece feels crafted rather than churned out.
Forged by the wyrm, marked by the claw.
Anything else
Our material, the independent testing behind it and the European safety framework are all covered on the materials, testing and safety page.
For everything else, email orders@dragondildo.com. Answering a question is always preferable to replacing a toy.