“Do I Need a Sex Toy Cleaner?”
In almost all cases, the answer is: ‘for the love of God, no’.
You see, a sex toy cleaner is a win-win for the manufacturer. Not only is it an easy upsell for customers who don’t know how to care for their sex toy (but want to ensure they’re doing it “right”), but it’s also an easy way for them to say “Care for our toys by using our sex toy cleaner” for an additional item for you to need to buy. Consider it the checkout “candy splurge” of the sex toy industry.
And you know what? Sex toy cleaners do clean their sex toys – and especially when a manufacturer wants to ensure that a cleanser is 100% compatible with their unique sex toy materials, a sex toy cleaner makes sense.
Plus, it’s a nice, easy, one-stop shop for you – the customer. Buy the toy, buy the lube, buy the sex toy cleaner – and boom. You’re done all in one, easy package.
However, guess what else works just as great for cleaning sex toys? It’s likely the soap you already have at home at 1/4th the price. With all of the sex toy companies releasing new sex toy cleaners right now, I feel like it’s important to revisit the fact that you DON’T need this upsell – and you don’t need to stress about ensuring you have a “specialized” sex toy cleaner on hand for almost every single sex toy on the market.
As long as your soap is safe for the sex toy material you’re buying, you can use the soap you have at home. Remember, however, that any soap you use on your sex toy may, potentially, end up inside of your body. This means you should avoid dish soap, soaps with bleach, and soaps that irritate your external skin already.
And for good measure, use a soap with minimal fragrance and no oils/lotions in it. (Your hands could probably use the skin-softening lotion. Your dildo? Not so much.)
What Soap to Clean Sex Toys?
Household hand soap will totally work, but don’t go putting Pine-Sol on your vibrator; try to remember that your sex toy goes into pretty sensitive membranes. In general, if you wouldn’t be comfortable spraying that cleanser in your body, it’s a no-go. That means that hand soaps tend to be the winners for cleaning sex toys. (Dishsoap is generally overkill since we’re not looking to remove oils and stuck-on food and grease from a sex toy).
Guess what? Your household hand soap probably works a-okay.
I’m a dork, and I refuse to clean things without foaming hand soap. (I don’t have a great explanation for you aside from the non-foaming stuff feels very squicky on my skin.)
So we almost always have some sort of foaming hand soap hanging around that gets used to clean toys. I know I’ve been using Dial Foaming Soap for (literally) the last five years on all of our sex toys (aside from Fleshlights – as noted below) with zero issue.
To reduce unnecessary contaminants, I recommend non-scented soap, but considering how hard it is to get non-scented soaps nowadays, if nothing else, aim for a soap that is minimally scented; if you can smell it on the toy after it’s done drying, it’s probably a no-go – especially for vaginal use. We regularly use a scented Dial Foaming Soap, and my vagina has yet to lodge a complaint, but if your chemistry is different than mine, investigate your soap if you’re finding potential issues.
(That being said, if your hand soap’s sole marketing purpose is the collectible scent – like that bath and body products store you can find in every mall – it’s probably not a great fit for cleaning sex toys.)
Some health and safety organizations are noting the potential danger of Benzalkonium chloride on vaginal health. If you want to minimize any potential safety concerns, you might want to do some further research into it. (My Dial Foaming Soap has this chemical – but if you’re going natural, Meyer’s Hand Soap and some other health-focused cleansers do not.)
Most Important Sex Toy Cleaning Tip
I mean, getting the right soap is good and all, but do you know what’s actually most important?
Being thorough in your cleaning.
I’ve seen some horror-level sex toy cleanings in my day – like simply rinsing under water in-between anal to vaginal. I’ve seen how some people clean their sex toys, and it just isn’t pretty.
While getting the right soap choice is important for your sex toy material, what’s MORE important is being thorough. You’re going to have to get your hands wet. You’re going to have to use your hands and fingers to scrub the surface of the toy. Just like washing your hands, you need to wash that sex toy’s surface for at least 20 seconds.
Even if you just had the best orgasm of your life.
Soap without any scrubbing motion is better than nothing – but not by a whole lot.
You don’t need to bring a wire bristle scrubbing brush to your sex toys (like really, please don’t do that), but both your hands should be involved in the process – and you might need a washcloth and soft toothbrush too.
Does your sex toy have any crevices? What about textures? Curves? Make sure you’re pushing – and finger-scrubbing – those areas – especially if they come in contact with bodily fluids.
For air suction toys, you need to get into that air-suction tip.
For penis strokers, you gotta clean out the entire internal chamber.
For rabbit vibes, you need to ensure that you’re cleaning that in-between area where the clitoral arm meets the shaft.
For dildos, ensure that you’re cleaning every inch – and do a cursory clean of the base too.
With ridges on any toy, ensure that you clean the ridge itself – and the flat surfaces around it.
Essentially, if the sex toy has a surface that contacts your body, it’s gotta be thoroughly cleaned.
Sex toy cleaning gets a lot easier when a sex toy is waterproof. Just bend over the sink in your post-pleasure stupor, get the toy wet and rinse of first-pass residuals, dump the soap on, finger scrub the entirety of the toy outside of the water, finger scrub the entirety of the toy underneath the water to get the soap off, and set it off to dry. It can take less than a minute once you’re used to doing it. (And you can always do an in-depth cleaning later after your nap.)
Proper sex toy cleaning sometimes means taking a toothbrush (not the one you’re using to brush your teeth OR the one you use to clean the grout, please!) or a toothpick to some of the seams of the toy to remove gunk.
After you’ve had to use a toothpick on your sex toy to clean it a few times, you start looking at those “decorative” designs a little bit more thoroughly when selecting sex toys.
But really: some sex toys just have those seams near areas with bodily fluids, and you have to clean them. It sucks, but it’s gotta get done.
The world of sex toy cleaning isn’t glamorous, but it’s better for your overall health – and can increase the longevity of your sex toy, too.
Sex Toys that Need Sex Toy Cleaner
Despite my giant rant, there actually are some sex toys that DO require sex toy cleaner. They are very, very few and far between, but they exist.
In those instances, check out the cleaning instructions for your toy when you buy it. If it specifically says NOT to use household soap, you might want a cleaner. Let me be clear there: the instructions need to state not to use a household soap specifically. A lot of sex toy companies have moved away from providing any actual cleaning instructions and moved towards “Use our-brand cleaning spray!” as the full cleaning instructions for your toy. Blech.
That’s not what we’re talking about here. The instructions need to specifically warn you away from using any household soap on your sex toy.
There are only a few toys on the market that required this that I know of, and they’re all penis stroking toys.
Fleshlight’s proprietary FleshSkin material, for example, includes some weirdly specific combination of ingredients that can break down if household soap is used to clean them. (That isn’t the case for most penis-stroking sleeves, and we clean our Tenga toys with the same above-mentioned cleansers as everything else in our toybox).
In that case, Fleshlight recommends that you rinse and hand-scrub the internals of your Fleshlight as best as possible to remove the lube and cum using as hot of water as you can tolerate. Fleshlight also sells their proprietary FleshWash which is designed to help clean your Fleshlight as well.
If you’re shopping for a toy you insert into your body, and it recommends steering clear of household cleansers, I’d do a double-check before purchasing. (Never heard of any, but I’m not the be-all, end-all of sex toy knowledge either.)
While penis strokers end up a-okay with elbow grease and water, it’s partially because the penis is external and without as much access to mucous membranes as the butt or vagina. The penis doesn’t have its own flora and bacteria balance, either. The vagina and butt do not share that property, and they are a lot more susceptible to bacteria that may remain on an uncleaned sex toy.
When Should I Use Sex Toy Cleaner?
Despite being a upsell in most cases, there are instances where sex toy cleaners make sense.
In particular, I love sex toy cleaners for three things: bedside use, kink events, and travel.
We keep a sex toy cleaner bottle at our bedside to spray down a toy after use. This lets us lazily fall asleep after use instead of thoroughly cleaning it up. When we wake up, we do the full, thorough clean with our hand soap.
I love a bottle of sex toy cleaner for travel, too. It’s another “line of defense” in my cleaning repertoire when I’m unsure if I’ll have access to a soap I enjoy. Many hotels offer that stupid bar of hand soap for cleaning, and I never feel like I get a complete clean on my sex toys with it. So I’ll partner that stupid hand soap with the bottle of sex toy cleanser to ensure nothing got missed.
I’m also a particularly kinky individual who regularly attends kink events where I’m essentially using sex toys in the middle of a convention hall or strip clubs near me – and washing my sex toys in a public space. I’ll spray a sex toy cleaner onto the toy when we’re done for a preliminary clean, toss it into a grocery bag, wrap it up, and toss it into my purse to wash when I’m back in private. The sex toy cleaner has kept the toy from being an absolute mess when I head straight to bed after the event and don’t remember to clean the toy until the next day.
Do I Need a UV Sex Toy Cleaner?
You totally know what my answer is going to be: nope.
However, if you’re someone who’s paranoid about absolute cleanliness OR someone who shares your non-porous sex toys on the regular and wants to ensure everything is as sterile as possible before letting someone else use your toys, a UV sex toy cleaner can be a pretty good solution. (For example, someone with a public dungeon or someone in a polyamorous household could really benefit from a UV sex toy cleaner.)
A UV sex toy cleaner does NOT stop you from needing to actually clean your toy though. A UV sex toy cleaner won’t be able to clean through caked-on lube, bodily fluids, or poop. You still need to do a thorough clean with that hand soap; sorry to break it to you.
But especially when you don’t necessarily trust your soap (like using an odd brand while traveling), a UV sex toy cleaner can be your second pass to ensure super-duper clean after you’re done with the regular clean.
(And on a bonus note, a lot of the full-size UV sex toy cleaners can actually sanitize lots of household objects. And you know what really DOES probably need that sanitizing? Your cell phone. Talk about a hot bed for germs.)
Sex Toy Cleaning: Final Thoughts
Remember that the sole purpose of cleaning your sex toy is to get any bacteria and contaminants cleaned off while simultaneously protecting the toy’s material and ensuring it doesn’t disrupt your use of the toy. For a lot of people, that can easily be achieved by using a hand soap you likely already have available at home.
If you’re doing that, that’s all you need to do. Do I need a sex toy cleaner? You don’t need to overthink it.
