The vibes have vibes. Sex toy colors aren’t accidental. Whether its manufacturing limitations or decades of market research, they ended up with a specific look and finish for a reason. Ordinary users may not know the technical stuff, but we do have an intuition about what the colors imply and how they make us feel.
I’m no sex toy marketing expert, but I’m extremely picky and opinionated. That’s good enough for me to inflict my views on others. Here are my unkempt opinions about sex toy colors.
Purple
Purple has been my favorite color since the day I picked it, and I don’t think there’s an industry that loves it more than the sex industry. Light purple gives a feminine touch, and we’ve yet to shake the Roman-derived association between deep purple and opulence. It’s the sex toy pick for people searching for something not too toy-like, but nonetheless want color in their lives.
Before I discovered the light of the Magic Wand, I reached for a purple vibrator when seeing someone new. It made no assumptions about my tastes save for the fact that I like color. It’s the one color in my toy collection that isn’t masculine or feminine. The gender of purple toys is fun.
Pink
Inoffensive. Feminine. Playful. That’s pink for me. I’m not averse to the color. I am averse to its status as the default choice for feminized marketing. Pink toys that aren’t outright flesh-toned are usually marketed at women. We’re still the main buyers of sex toys, and so we’ll continue to suffer the scourge of pink everything.
In sex toys, pink is ubiquitous enough to be completely innocuous. All it says about the toy is that someone in marketing meant to sell it to women. Maybe. It’s otherwise easy to integrate into anything. I like girlypop light pink toys (especially in glass). Luxury manufacturers use vibrant, deep pinks to accent their toy ranges. The worst thing I can say about it is that sometimes, a toy doesn’t know if it wants to be an unobtrusive pink or pale flesh-toned. My first pink was squishy and had veins, so you’d think ‘realistic’, right? It was also the most shrimptastic shade of light pink. It was on thin ice before I tossed it for not being body-safe.
Green
There’s a joke in PC gaming circles that if you build a PC with blue lighting, you want it to run cool. Red lighting is for high-performance. Green is for an environmentally gaming machine. But this isn’t PC building. When I see a green sex toy, I can only think of monster dicks. Sorry.
Our cultural zeitgeist still hasn’t shaken the idea of green ‘flesh’ being alien, and since sex toys are often flesh analogues, green inevitably lends itself to more…exotic designs. Green sex toys modelled after monster fantasies are a helpful fig leaf for people’s dicier interests. Monster fucking fantasies are not zoophilia, but there’s definitely some cross-pollination in the design language. Spectacularly bright tentacle dildos are a safe way to explore taboo kinks.
Maybe this is the natural progression of a Twilight fandom that fixated on yesteryear’s handsome werewolves becoming today’s sex toy designers.
Blue
Blue is safe. Blue is comforting. It’s the pick-of-choice when things should be approachable. It’s a favorite of therapists and corporate marketing. My ‘Comms’ category in my phone apps has Discord, Messenger, Teams, Telegram, Truecaller, and Zoom. They all use a variation of blue in their logos. Facebook, LinkedIn, the late Twitter all went with it. Bluesky named itself after the color. I’ve never seen a blue car I found wholly offensive. There is a shade of blue that is flattering on anyone. I even look to the skies when my eyes are tired.
Maybe that’s why I’m a little surprised I don’t see more blue sex toys. Do cool sky-and-ocean shades not evoke the aggression people associate with sex? Make no mistake, it does show up. Translucent blue dildos with floating glitter were a mainstay in brick-and-mortar sex stores. Luxury sex toy manufacturers sometimes use it to evoke a technological edge. Blue makes a good showing in fantasy and monster toys where combining it with visually ‘fleshy’ textures is an instant-win for the alien aesthetic.
Flesh tones
These always get a reaction. My circle doesn’t like flesh tones because they’re uncanny. Other people live for shades of brown and peach because they’re usually attached to softer, ‘realistic’ toys. Personally, I’m not interested in being jump-scared by my sex toy drawer. I like my sextoys to look manufactured, not harvested.
I won’t disparage their users and lovers, though. Soft, ‘realistic’ toys are important to people who enjoy imagining a body attached to it. They’re also frequently attached to my favorite ergonomic device: the suction cup. It’s great if you want partnered sex without the partner. ‘Realistic’ toy ranges are also the only place to get well-simulated vaginas, penises, mouths, and labia without explaining monster fucking fantasies to people.
Black
When black sex toys and accessories come to mind, I think of leather subcultures, kink, and gay men of the 90s through the 00s. Black sex toys have a masculine edginess that originates in the underground gay scenes of less inclusive decades. Stark black colors stand out on skin, aided by contrasting metallic accents via buckles, studs, and spikes. Legacy manufacturers with questionable records of body-safety like Doc Johnson always have a ‘For Him’ lineup entirely in black. Sex toys that assume an audience of masculine men not partnered to women never shy away from it. It flatters everything and has an edge.
I think that the color black is now bound to kink and its attendant aesthetics. Goth and leather looks have been in the mainstream for over a decade. Some of us started wearing chokers and collars publicly in the 2010s craze and never stopped. Conversely, black has less of the counterculture association it used to have. I used to perceive black sex toys as being a ‘guy thing’, but that just gives away the environment I was raised in. Now, I just think they’re a good pick for people who don’t care about this toy’s looks, or care a lot about this specific toy’s look.
White
I was an iPod kid so I can’t divorce glossy white consumer goods from Green Day’s American Idiot. An album which I recently heard listed among ‘oldies’, so that’s awful.
White sex toys make me think corporate. Most white toys are plastic and plastic manufacturing isn’t cheap to set up. Even massagers and expensive showerheads repurposed for masturbation come in white. The companies pursuing that look have money, and they’ll market their product as ‘clean’ and ‘modern. That’s the opposite approach to hand-made sex toy businesses that seek creativity and the imperfection of human crafts.
It polarizes me. I can see why it’s used by manufacturers wanting to portray sleekness and modernity. The iPod aesthetic works. Some companies (Lelo) use it to evoke luxury. Others (Lush) convey a technological edge. Lush leads the remote vibrator industry – largely thanks to sex workers – and inoffensively contemporary designs are a mainstay on screens worldwide. By the way, the industry term for remote-control and app-mediated sex toys is teledildonics. Great word. Drop it during Christmas lunch for me.
All that is to say: I still can’t divorce white sex toys from iPods. It’s why things like that ‘Lionness’ AI-integrated vibrator weird me out. It has the featureless, Apple design language. But you’re supposed to let its sensors ‘learn’ your body while it’s in you and send that data to the company’s servers to uh… improve your orgasms, as the marketing claims.
Metallics
Historically, metals in sex toys were a point of necessity. Due to the cost and complexity involved, only the most critical parts could be in metal. Buckles, reinforcements, and suspension equipment come to my mind. As metal became cheaper and metal-coated plastic became widely available, it’s gotten pretty commonplace. Metallics add a touch of expense when used to accent a toy. It’s a textural difference that literally looks ‘polished’. Of course, most toys with a metallic component aren’t what they claim to be. They’re usually metal-coated plastic, or even dense plastic with a metallic outer coating.
I love metallic toys that are actually all-metal in construction. High quality anal hooks, Eternity collars, nJoy plugs. They’re usually the domain of specialist manufacturers because making something all-metal safe for sex is difficult. I love it when it’s executed well. I don’t begrudge that semi-metal gem buttplug in people’s collections at all, but there is something special about the weight and durability. Your floor will chip long before the toy does.
Multi-color/iridescence
When I first started sex toy shopping, your only options were pink, black, glass, and ‘luxury’. My first toy was a nondescript black buttplug of questionable workmanship. I went to a sex store in person and nearly had a panic attack over how taboo the whole thing was. I didn’t even like that plug.
I hold no nostalgia over the older world with fewer options and more stress. Color is everywhere now. The monster-enjoyers have outlandishly tentacular implements of orifice destruction in every shade they want. Some of them glow in the dark. At some point, metallic devices became rainbow-colored. Every year, a dozen manufacturers make a Pride collection with rainbow insertable—I’m not going to put that emblem in my butt, but I defend everyone else’s right to do it to theirs.
Multi-color toys are too diverse to draw a single conclusion. The blue-and-white fancy ‘massager’ has a very different vibe to a silicone ovipositor dildo as thick as my forearm. I don’t want either of those in me, but my shared feeling between them is that I’m glad they exist. There should be as many hues as there are people who want to use them. Nobody should be confined to one color ’cause gendered colors or manufacturing limitations said so.
