Bondage gear: what it is made of, and why that is a hygiene decision

If You Only Have Thirty Seconds

We sell 929 pieces of bondage gear today and we went through all of them, field by field, to write this. The short version is that the question people spend their time on, leather or silicone, cheap or expensive, beginner set or single piece, is not the question that decides whether the purchase was a good one. The question that decides it is whether the thing can be cleaned properly, and that is settled entirely by the material, before you have bought anything.

Here is the split. Of the 929 pieces in stock, 448 are made of a material that survives boiling water or a wipe with alcohol: metal, silicone, glass, hard plastic. 347 are made of something that absorbs and cannot be disinfected at all, which is leather, vegan leather, neoprene, nylon, rope, fabric and latex. The remaining 134 do not say what they are made of, and a listing that does not say is not a listing you can answer this question from. That is not a scandal and it is not a reason to avoid the category. It is a fact about the shelf that changes what you buy: gear that only ever touches one person's skin can be porous, and gear that goes in a mouth, on a nipple or between two people should not be.

If you have never bought any of this: buy one piece, not a set, and buy it in silicone or metal. A pair of wrist cuffs and one other thing is a better first purchase than a boxed kit, and the reason is in this page: of the 37 kits we sell, exactly 1 is made of a material you could disinfect, and 13 of them do not list their materials at all. A kit is five or six objects sold as one, and the specification collapses to whatever the least informative of the six says, which is usually nothing.

If you already know what you want, the second thing worth knowing is about sizes. 279 of the 929 pieces publish a measurement of the product itself, which is under a third. Meanwhile 428 of them publish a set of measurements that looks exactly like the answer and is not: it is the carton the thing ships in, three numbers in millimeters, passed from a supplier feed straight onto the page. Once you have seen that pattern you will see it on every bondage listing on the internet, ours included, and the rest of this page explains how to read around it.

And the finding we did not expect. Across the three price thirds of this category, everything you would want to know gets worse as the price goes up. In the cheapest third, 297 of 321 pieces declare a material and 150 publish a measurement. In the most expensive third, it is 231 of 295 and 43. You pay more and you are told less, consistently, in both directions at once. We have no flattering explanation for that, and we did not expect our own catalog to hand it to us.

Every piece of bondage gear in stock on 02-09-2026, counted on our live catalog. "Material declared" means the listing names a material we can map to a family: a field filled in with "high-quality materials" is filled in and declares nothing, and it is not counted here. "Non-porous" means metal, silicone, glass or hard plastic, the materials that survive boiling water or alcohol. "Publishes a measurement" excludes the packaging dimensions, which is a separate problem explained below. 135 products filed under BDSM were set aside because they are not bondage gear: dildos, plugs, strokers, lingerie, jewelry and board games.

What Is Actually Filed Under BDSM

Before any of the counting, a piece of housekeeping that turned out to change every number on this page. The BDSM category in our catalog holds 1064 products that are in stock and buyable today, and 135 of them are not bondage gear. They are dildos, butt plugs, strokers, lingerie, body jewelry, board games and a bottle of latex cleaner. They are filed there because that is where a supplier put them or because the word fetish appears in the name, and every one of them is a legitimate product that somebody wants. None of them belongs in a comparison of restraints.

This matters more than a tidiness note. Silicone is the second most common material in this category, and a large share of the silicone in the raw category is anal plugs, which are not gear you tie anybody up with. Leave them in and the sentence "silicone is what gags and collars are made of" turns into a sentence about plugs wearing a gag's clothes. The median price moves too. So the first thing we did was decide, once, what counts, and write that decision into the data rather than into a filter that each table applies for itself. Every figure on this page is computed over the same 929 pieces, and the 135 apart are apart everywhere.

The fourteen things this category actually contains

Sorted by how much of the shelf they occupy, the gear breaks into restraints and cuffs (201), gags (91), whips and paddles (89), collars and leashes (86), cock and ball rings (80), blindfolds and masks (79), nipple clamps (72), harnesses (66), electro-stimulation (53), kits (37), ticklers and sensation-play pieces (28), cages and chastity devices (23), furniture and swings (21) and spreader bars (3). That is the whole category, and the table above gives each of them its own row.

Two of those groupings deserve a word, because they are judgment calls rather than facts. Cock and ball rings sit under BDSM here and they are also a category in their own right with their own buying question, which is fit rather than material; we have kept them in because that is where our catalog puts them and because a fair number of them are unmistakably fetish objects rather than plain rings. Kits are a genuine category and also a problem, since a kit's material is the material of everything inside it; they get their own section further down, and they are excluded from the six cards, because a kit cannot be an example of anything.

One more thing about the shelf itself, because it explains a pattern you will notice. Most of the cheapest third of this category comes from a single supplier's own line rather than from a named manufacturer, and those listings are the ones that fill in the specification table most reliably. The expensive end is where the named brands are, and it is also where the fields go empty. That inversion runs through everything below.

The Material Is a Hygiene Decision, Not a Taste One

In most of a sex-toy catalog, material is a comfort question. Silicone feels different from glass, ABS feels different from steel, and the difference matters to you and to nobody else. Bondage gear is the exception, and it is the exception for two reasons that stack. This is the gear most likely to be used by more than one person, because restraint is a two-person activity by construction. And it is the gear most likely to end up somewhere it should not have been: a gag sits in a mouth, clamps sit on skin that breaks easily, cuffs sit on wrists for an hour, a collar rests against a throat. Put those together and the material stops being about feel. It decides whether the piece can be brought back to a state where it is safe to use again.

Porous and non-porous, which is the only division that matters

The property that decides it is porosity, and it is a physical fact about the material rather than an opinion about the brand. Silicone, metal, glass and hard plastics such as ABS have a surface with no structure for anything to get into. You can wash them with soap and water, wipe them with alcohol, and in the case of silicone, metal and glass you can put them in boiling water. Whatever was on them is gone. Leather, vegan leather, neoprene, nylon webbing, cotton rope, satin and fabric do not work that way. They are open structures. Liquid goes in, and soap and water take the surface and leave the inside. There is no household process that sterilizes them, and the manufacturers do not claim there is.

Sorting our 929 pieces by that line gives 448 you can genuinely disinfect, 347 you cannot, and 134 where the listing does not say enough to place them on either side. The table above puts the same split family by family, and the second table gives it by material, one row per piece with no double counting. We want to be careful about the tone here, because it would be easy to turn this into an accusation and it is not one. A leather cuff is not a defective product. It is a product with a constraint, and the constraint is one that no listing in this category, ours included, tells you about at the moment you are deciding.

What this means in practice, which is less dramatic than it sounds

It does not mean buy only silicone. It means match the material to how the piece will be used, and the rule fits in two lines. If the piece will only ever touch one person's intact skin, and that person is the only person who will ever use it, porous is fine and always has been: a leather cuff belonging to one person, cleaned on the surface and kept dry, is not a hygiene problem in any meaningful sense. If the piece goes anywhere near a mucous membrane, or if more than one person is going to use it, buy it in a material you can boil or wipe with alcohol, and treat that as non-negotiable rather than as a preference.

The practical dividing line, then, is not by object type but by what the object touches. Gags and nipple clamps are the clearest case in the whole category, because a gag sits in saliva and a clamp sits on skin it is deliberately pinching. Cuffs and collars are the middle case: they touch skin that is normally intact, for a while, and the risk is real but much smaller. Blindfolds and harnesses touch skin that is almost always intact, and they are the case where porous is genuinely unproblematic for one owner.

The leather that is not leather, and it is the majority

Here is the counting surprise, and it changed a paragraph we had already drafted. Bondage gear has a long association with leather, and our catalog does not support it. Real leather is the main material of 88 pieces. Vegan leather, which means polyurethane on a fabric backing and is also sold as PU leather, faux leather, eco-leather and polipiel, is the main material of 90. Counting mentions rather than main materials, so including every piece where the word appears anywhere in the material field, it is 108 against 178. The synthetic is not the budget alternative here. It is the default.

Two things follow from that, and they point in opposite directions. The first is that vegan leather is the more expensive of the two in this catalog, not the cheaper: its median price is well above real leather's, and the reason is what it gets used for. Vegan leather goes into harnesses and masks, which are large, constructed pieces with a lot of hardware. Real leather goes into cuffs and rings, which are small. So the difference in price is not a difference in quality between two materials, it is a difference in what each one is asked to make, and reading it as a quality signal would be a mistake.

The second is more useful. Vegan leather is not more sterilizable than real leather, because the fabric backing absorbs just as readily. But its surface is a plastic film, and a plastic film wipes clean in a way that a grain leather surface does not: what lands on it stays on top of it. So between two otherwise identical cuffs, the synthetic is the easier one to keep clean, which is the opposite of what most people assume when they see the word vegan next to a lower expectation of quality. Neither one is in the disinfectable column, and neither one should be shared.

And the pieces that do not say

134 of the 929 pieces do not tell you what they are made of, and that number deserves more care than it usually gets, because there are two different things inside it. Some listings leave the material field empty, which is an omission. Others fill it in with something that is not a material: high-quality materials, premium materials, resistant and safe materials, varied, various, nickel free. We counted those separately, and there are 25 of them. A field filled in with high-quality materials is filled in, it makes the page look complete, and it tells you exactly as much as a blank one. We are counting our own product pages here, so this is a description of a job we have not finished rather than a complaint about somebody else.

Where the gaps sit is the part worth acting on. They are not spread evenly: they cluster in electro-stimulation and in kits and furniture, which happen to be the three most expensive families we sell. When a listing does not name a material, the honest reading is that you do not know, and the honest advice is to ask before buying rather than to assume. For a specific product on a specific day that is a question we can answer; a page about a whole category cannot answer it for you.

One row per product, never two: where a listing names several materials we take the first one it names, which is the one manufacturers put first. That is why these rows add up to the 929 pieces in the table above rather than overshooting it. "Non-porous" is about disinfection, not durability: a leather cuff can outlast a silicone one and still be impossible to sterilize.

Where the Category Gets This Right, and the Two Places It Does Not

Having drawn that line, the obvious next question is whether the shelf respects it, and the answer is more encouraging than we expected when we started counting. Broadly, the objects that go somewhere delicate are made of materials you can clean, and the objects that only touch skin are not. That is the correct arrangement, and it happened without anybody announcing it.

Nipple clamps are the strongest case. 64 of the 72 we stock are metal, silicone or hard plastic, which is nine in ten, and it makes sense: a clamp is a small piece of hardware, there is nothing to gain by making it out of fabric, and it is used on skin that is being deliberately compressed. Gags come next, with 68 of 91 on the cleanable side, mostly because the ball itself is silicone even when the strap is not. Cock rings and cages follow the same pattern for the same reason.

At the other end, blindfolds are 57 porous out of 79, and that is fine. A blindfold is a piece of padded fabric that sits on a forehead and a nose. Nothing about it needs to survive boiling, and making it out of silicone would produce a worse blindfold. Harnesses are the same story: 43 of 66 are porous, and a harness is a garment, worn over skin, by one person. Neither of these is a problem and we are not going to invent one.

The first exception: restraints

Restraints and cuffs are the largest family in the category at 201 pieces, and they are almost exactly split: 87 you can disinfect against 93 you cannot, with the rest not saying. That split is a coin toss at the moment of purchase, and it is invisible unless you go looking for the material field, because a padded nylon cuff and a padded neoprene cuff and a padded vegan leather cuff look identical in a photograph and cost about the same.

This is the family where the distinction has real consequences, because cuffs come in pairs, get used on two people as often as on one, and spend longer against skin than anything else here. If you are buying one pair of cuffs and you do not know yet how you will use them, the silicone or the metal is the choice that keeps every option open. If you already know they are yours alone, buy the leather, and enjoy it.

The second exception, and it is the one that annoys us: kits

Of the 37 kits and boxed sets we sell, 1 is made of a material we would call disinfectable, and 13 do not declare their materials at all. The typical kit is a blindfold, a pair of cuffs, a whip and a feather in a presentation box, which means the object with the strictest hygiene requirement in the box, usually the gag or the clamps, comes wrapped in the specification of the object with the loosest.

The reason this matters is not that kits are badly made. It is that a kit is what a first-time buyer buys, so the worst-specified corner of the category is the corner most beginners start in. It has its own section further down, because the case against it is stronger than a paragraph can carry and because there is a straightforward alternative that costs less.

The Measurement, and the Box That Pretends to Be One

The second thing worth knowing about this category is what happens when you look for a size. 279 of the 929 pieces in stock publish a measurement of the product itself somewhere on the page, which is under a third of the shelf. That is a gap, and gaps are ordinary. What is not ordinary is what fills it.

Most of the Dimensions fields hold the carton

509 of our bondage listings have a field called Dimensions, and it is populated, and it contains three numbers and a unit. On 428 of them, that value is the box. A whip and a blindfold and a pair of nipple clamps can carry the same 120 x 50 x 100 mm, because that is the carton the supplier ships them in, and it went from a data feed into a field on a product page where it sits looking exactly like a specification.

The tell is the format, not the field name, and that distinction cost us a day. In another part of the catalog the same Dimensions field genuinely holds the product, written in centimeters with one or two axes. Here it holds the packaging, written in millimeters with three. So you cannot decide by the label on the field, you have to look at the shape of the value: three axes in millimeters is a carton, almost every time. That is the rule our own counting now uses, and it is the rule we would give a shopper. If a bondage listing shows you three numbers separated by an x and the unit is mm, that number is not about the object.

We are describing our own pages. Nobody put that field there to mislead anyone; it is what happens when a supplier feed has a dimensions column and a catalog has a dimensions field, and no human reads either. A person looking at one listing does not notice, because three numbers and a unit is what a specification looks like. It takes counting the shape of every value in the field to see it, which is what we did, and it is the sort of thing that stays invisible until somebody counts.

Where the real measurements are, and it is not where we expected

The good news is that the pieces that do publish a real measurement are, mostly, the pieces where a measurement decides the purchase. Collars publish one 44 times out of 86 and gags 45 out of 91, which is about half of each family and the two best rates on the shelf; restraints publish one 69 times out of 201, which is a third of them and, because the family is so large, the biggest single group of published measurements in the category. Those are the three families where the number is the difference between a piece that works and a piece that sits in a drawer.

Blindfolds publish one 4 times out of 79, and that is the correct answer rather than a failure: a blindfold either has an elastic strap or it has a buckle, and its length in centimeters is not information anybody uses. Electro-stimulation publishes a measurement 1 time in 53 products, which is a gap of a different kind, since electrode size genuinely matters and nobody is publishing it.

The measurement that is real and still tells you the wrong thing

There is a subtler failure inside the good news, and gags are where we found it. Of the 45 gags that publish a measurement, 31 publish something small, four or four and a half centimeters, which is the diameter of the ball, and that is the number a buyer needs. The other 14 publish something large, sixty-six centimeters, sixty-three, a range from thirty-seven to fifty-two. Those are straps. Both sets of numbers live in the same field, sometimes in a field literally called insertable size, and a sixty-six centimeter insertable size is not a claim anybody intends to make.

So the counting statement, gags publish a measurement about half the time, is true and is not the statement a shopper needs. The statement a shopper needs is that a gag has two numbers, the ball and the strap, that the ball is the one that decides whether it fits and the strap is the one that decides whether it stays on, and that our listings publish one or the other without labeling which. If the number is under about six centimeters it is the ball; if it is over twenty it is the strap. That is a rule of thumb and it is the best this data supports.

What to do about all of it

Three habits, none of them difficult. Measure yourself first for anything that fastens around a body part, which means wrists, ankles, neck and head, with a tape or a strip of paper and a ruler; those four numbers cover almost everything in this category and they are the only figures in this transaction that nobody can get wrong for you. Read a three-axis millimeter value as packaging and ignore it. And for a rigid piece, meaning metal cuffs, a metal collar, a cage, treat a listing with no stated internal measurement as not for sale to you, because rigid does not forgive a guess and cannot be cut off at home.

The Adjustment Range Is the Most Honest Number Here

Something we did not expect to find in a category with this much missing data: a small group of listings that publish sizing better than almost anything else we sell. 64 pieces give their measurement as a range rather than a number. Not seventeen centimeters, but seventeen to twenty-nine. Not a nominal size, but the span the buckle actually covers.

That is a strictly better piece of information and it is worth saying why. A single number on an adjustable strap is ambiguous by construction: it might be the shortest setting, the longest, the strap laid flat including the hardware, or the size the manufacturer considers typical. A buyer cannot tell which, and the four readings differ by enough to decide whether a cuff closes on a thin wrist. A range removes the ambiguity completely. It tells you the smallest wrist it will hold and the largest it will reach, and if your measurement falls inside it, the piece fits.

Almost all of them are cuffs

The ranges are not spread across the category. 47 of the 64 belong to restraints and cuffs, 10 to collars, 6 to gag straps and 1 to a blindfold. Within restraints that is 47 of the 69 that publish a measurement at all, so among cuffs that say anything, the range is the majority format rather than the exception.

There is a plain reason for that and it is not virtue. A cuff is the piece where a wrong size is most obviously the seller's problem: it does not fasten, it comes back, and the shape of the object makes the range the natural thing to write down, because the buckle has a first hole and a last hole and the manufacturer knows both. The interesting part is not why cuffs do it, it is that nothing else does. A collar has a first hole and a last hole too, and 10 of 86 collars publish the span.

How to use this when you are choosing

Prefer the range. Between two similar cuffs at a similar price, one saying twenty-two centimeters and one saying seventeen to thirty-one, the second is the safer purchase even if you have no idea what your wrist measures, because it will be right across a wider span of guesses. And if you do know your measurement, a range converts the decision into arithmetic instead of a gamble.

The corollary is worth stating too, because it is the failure this section is really about. A single number on a piece that adjusts is not a measurement, it is one end of a measurement with the label removed, and the honest way to read it is as a rough indication that the object is roughly that size. Where a listing gives you a range, someone decided to tell you something true. Where it gives you one number, nobody decided anything.

What It Costs, and What Happens to the Information as the Price Climbs

Bondage gear is cheap, and that is the first thing to say plainly, because the imagery around it suggests otherwise. Split our 929 pieces into three equal thirds by price and the boundaries fall low; the median price of every family is in the table above, and the six largest families on the shelf, which between them are more than half of it, all sit at the bottom of it. Whips, gags, clamps, blindfolds, cuffs and rings are among the least expensive things we sell, of any kind.

What is expensive is a short list, and it is expensive for reasons that have nothing to do with the bondage part. Furniture and swings have by far the highest median in the category, because they are furniture. Electro-stimulation is next, because it contains electronics, and a dual-channel stimulator is a piece of medical-adjacent hardware. Cages and harnesses follow, both of them constructed objects with hardware and stitching. Everything else is inexpensive, and the price differences within a family are mostly differences in size and finish rather than in kind.

The pattern that runs the wrong way

Now the part we did not go looking for. Take those same three price thirds and ask, in each, how many listings declare a material at all. In the cheapest third it is 297 of 321. In the middle, 267 of 313. In the most expensive third, 231 of 295. Ask the same about measurements and it is 150, then 86, then 43. Ask how many are made of something you could disinfect and it is 193, then 145, then 110.

Three independent things, all sloping the same way, across a third of a thousand products each. The more you spend in this category, the less the page tells you and the less likely it is that what arrives can be sterilized. That is not the relationship anybody would predict, and it is not a small effect: the measurement figure falls by roughly two thirds between the cheapest and dearest thirds.

Why it happens, as far as we can tell

We can account for most of it without anybody behaving badly, and it is worth doing so rather than leaving a dark hint hanging. The cheap end of this category is dominated by one supplier's own line, whose listings are generated from a structured feed: every product gets a material, a size and a set of fields, because a machine fills them. The expensive end is where the named manufacturers are, and their product data arrives as marketing copy with a photograph. Copy does not have a material field. So the difference is not care, it is format, and the machine-made listing happens to be the informative one.

The material half has a second cause that is genuine rather than clerical. The expensive families are expensive because they are complicated, and a complicated object does not have one material. A stimulator is a plastic box with metal contacts and rubber cables; a sex swing is nylon webbing, metal hardware and padded fabric. Asking that object for its material is asking a question it cannot answer in one word, and a lot of the blanks at the top of the price range are that rather than an omission. That is fair. It also does not help you, and both things can be true at once.

The practical consequence is a habit rather than a rule. In this category, do not read a high price as a signal of quality information. If two pieces do the same job and the cheaper one tells you what it is made of and how big it is, the cheaper one is very often the better-documented purchase, and in a category where material decides hygiene, better documented is worth more than it sounds.

Restraints and Cuffs

The largest family in the category by a distance: 201 pieces, roughly a fifth of everything we stock under BDSM. It covers wrist and ankle cuffs, handcuffs, under-bed systems, rope, bondage tape, hog ties and connector straps, and the price band is narrow, with the median in the table above. This is the family most people buy first and the one where the material decision is least visible.

The split that decides everything else

87 of the 201 are metal, silicone or hard plastic. 93 are leather, vegan leather, neoprene, nylon or rope. The rest do not say. Since the porous half and the non-porous half look the same in a product photograph and cost about the same, the material field is the only thing separating them at the moment you choose, and it is a field most people never open.

Metal is the single most common material here, which surprised us until we looked at what it covers: it is not just handcuffs but the chains, rings and hardware that the material field of a padded cuff often names first. Nylon and neoprene are the workhorses of the padded-cuff end, and both are comfortable and both are porous. Rope is a small group, 11 pieces across the whole category, and cotton rope is porous in the most literal sense of any material we sell.

Sizing, where this family is better than the rest of the shelf

69 of 201 restraints publish a measurement, and 47 of those give it as an adjustment range, which is the best sizing information in the category. If you take one thing from this section, take that: a cuff that says seventeen to thirty-one centimeters is telling you something a cuff that says twenty-four is not.

Measure the wrist you intend to cuff, around the joint, and expect a comfortable cuff to sit a little above that number rather than at it. The failure mode people worry about is a cuff that is too loose and slips off, and the failure mode that actually causes trouble is a cuff that is too tight, because a strap that leaves a mark after twenty minutes leaves a problem after an hour. If the range brackets your measurement with room at both ends, you have the right one.

Rigid versus padded, which is the other real decision

Metal handcuffs are cheap and they look the part, and there is a mechanical reason they disappoint that has nothing to do with hygiene: they do not distribute pressure. A rigid steel band on a wrist concentrates force on two points, and the wearer moves, and that is how a bruise happens during something that was meant to be comfortable. If you want metal, look for a hinged or double-locking design that cannot tighten further under struggle, and if you want to be tied up for any length of time, buy padded and accept that padded means porous.

The honest recommendation for a first purchase, then, is a padded adjustable cuff with a published range, in silicone if you can find one at the size you need and in vegan leather if you cannot, because the plastic surface of the synthetic wipes down better than grain leather does. Keep metal for the pieces where rigidity is the point, and keep rope for when somebody in the room already knows what they are doing with it.

Gags

91 pieces, and the family where the material rule is least negotiable, because this is the only category of bondage gear that goes inside a mouth. 54 of them are silicone, which is the right answer, and 68 in total are made of something that can be boiled or wiped with alcohol. If you buy one thing from this page on the strength of the hygiene argument, buy the gag in silicone and do not think about it again.

Two numbers, and the listings give you one of them

A gag has a ball and a strap, and they answer different questions. The ball diameter decides whether the gag is usable at all: too large and the jaw will not close around it, too small and it does nothing. The strap length decides whether it stays on a given head. 45 of 91 gags publish one of those numbers, and as the measurement section explains, our listings mix them in the same field without saying which is which. Read anything under about six centimeters as the ball and anything over twenty as the strap.

On ball size, the shelf is narrower than it looks. The overwhelming majority of published diameters cluster at four and four and a half centimeters, which is the standard adult size and the size a first gag should be. Larger balls exist and they are a specialist purchase; a beginner buying one because bigger sounds more serious will buy something they cannot wear for ten minutes. Smaller is the safer error in both directions.

Breathable, which is a word doing a lot of work

A large share of the gags in this family are described as breathable, and it is worth being precise about what that means, because it is the one place in this category where a misunderstanding could matter. A breathable gag is a ball with holes through it, so that if the nose is blocked there is still a path for air. It is a sensible design and it is better than a solid ball. It is not a safety guarantee, and no gag is: a gagged person cannot speak, cannot easily signal, and can be sick. The standard practice is a non-verbal signal agreed in advance, an object held in the hand that gets dropped, and somebody in the room the whole time. That is not our advice as a shop, it is the ordinary practice of the activity.

Straps, buckles and the cleaning problem nobody mentions

Here is the awkward part of the hygiene argument, and we would rather write it down than let the silicone recommendation sound cleaner than it is. On most gags the ball is silicone and the strap is not: it is vegan leather, or nylon, or fabric. The ball is the part that gets wet and it is the part you can sterilize, which is the right way around. But the strap sits against the corners of the mouth, gets wet too, and cannot be boiled without destroying the buckle, and it usually cannot be detached.

So the practical routine for a gag is not one process but two. Wash the ball with soap and hot water after every use, and if it detaches, boil it occasionally. Wipe the strap, hang it to dry properly rather than putting it back in a drawer damp, and accept that it is the part that ages. If a gag is going to be used by more than one person, the strap is the reason the honest answer is one gag per person rather than one gag shared, and gags are inexpensive enough that this is a cheap rule to follow.

If you want the version with no compromise, a small number of gags in this category are silicone throughout, ball and strap in one molded piece with a plastic buckle. They are less adjustable and they look less like the thing in the photographs, and they are the only gags in the category that can go into boiling water whole.

Collars, Blindfolds and Harnesses

Three families that get grouped together here because they share a shape of problem: they are worn rather than applied, they are sized to a body rather than to a hand, and between them they hold most of the porous material in the category. 86 collars, 79 blindfolds and masks, 66 harnesses.

Collars, which are better documented than they have any right to be

Collars publish a measurement 44 times out of 86, which is the highest rate of any family in this category, and 10 of those give an adjustment range. They also hold more silicone than anything except gags, 38 pieces, and 48 of them in total are non-porous. Silicone collars solve a real problem, which is that a collar sits on the neck for a long time and a porous collar worn for a long time gets damp.

Two practical notes. Measure the neck and add a couple of centimeters rather than buying to the exact number, because a collar that fits exactly is a collar that is uncomfortable when the head turns; the standard check is that two fingers should slide under it. And a collar with a fixed leash ring is a different object from a collar with a detachable one, in the sense that the first is a piece of equipment and the second is something that can be worn in more places, which is a large part of why people buy them.

Blindfolds, where almost everything is porous and it does not matter

57 of the 79 blindfolds and masks are made of something that cannot be sterilized, mostly satin, fabric, vegan leather and lace, and this is the one family where we would tell you to stop worrying about the hygiene argument. A blindfold touches a forehead, a nose and the skin around the eyes, all of it normally intact, on one person at a time. Soap and water on the surface is proportionate.

It is also the family with the least sizing information, 4 listings out of 79, and again that is the correct answer rather than a gap, because a blindfold is either elasticated or buckled and both accommodate almost any head. What does vary and is worth looking at in the photograph is the shape of the nose cutout and whether the padding is deep enough to stop light coming in from below, which is the difference between a blindfold that works and one that is a decorative strip of satin. Nobody publishes that, and you can see it in the picture.

Harnesses, the most expensive of the three and the least specified

Harnesses are the priciest family of the three by a wide margin, 43 of 66 are porous, and only 15 publish a measurement. That combination is the worst in the category for a garment, because a harness is the piece in this whole guide that most needs a size and most rarely has one: it crosses the chest, the shoulders and the waist, and a chest harness that does not fit is not adjustable into fitting the way a cuff is.

Vegan leather is the dominant material, which is a genuine improvement on the traditional answer for a garment worn against skin, because the plastic surface can be wiped and the leather one cannot. Buy from a listing that gives a chest measurement or a size letter with a range behind it, and if it gives neither, ask before ordering rather than after. Of everything on this page, this is the family where a wrong purchase is least recoverable.

Clamps, Whips and the Impact Family

Two families with almost nothing in common except that both of them do something to skin: 72 nipple clamps and 89 whips, paddles and floggers. Nipple clamps are the cheapest of the nine families with more than fifty pieces in them, and whips sit in the middle of that group; both are among the least expensive things in this guide.

Clamps are the cleanest family we sell

64 of 72 nipple clamps are metal, silicone or hard plastic, which is the highest proportion of any family on the shelf. 46 of them are metal. Nothing here needed a policy: a clamp is a small piece of hardware with a spring, there is nothing to gain by making it out of cloth, and the result is a family you can put in boiling water almost without checking.

Sizing is thinner, 21 of 72 publishing a measurement, and it matters less: a clamp adjusts or it does not. The thing to look for instead is adjustability, and it is not in the specification field. A clamp with a screw or a sliding ring lets you set the pressure; a clamp with a fixed spring gives you the pressure the manufacturer chose. For a first pair, adjustable is the answer by a distance, because the useful range of pressure is narrow and personal and a fixed clamp is either nothing or too much. Clover-style clamps, which tighten when the chain is pulled, are the opposite of a beginner purchase and are usually described in a way that makes that clear.

The other thing nobody publishes is time, so here it is as general practice rather than as a claim about our products: clamps hurt most coming off, not going on, and the standard guidance in the activity is to keep them on for a limited stretch rather than an evening. That is not a product specification and no listing will tell you.

Whips and paddles, where the material field goes quiet

89 pieces, and 25 of them do not declare a material, which among the nine families with more than fifty pieces is beaten only by electro-stimulation. That is a shame, because material is exactly what separates one impact toy from another: a soft suede flogger, a stiff vegan leather paddle and a silicone slapper produce completely different sensations from the same swing, and the photograph does not tell you which you are looking at.

34 of them publish a length, and length is genuinely useful here in a way it is not elsewhere, because it tells you how much room you need and how much control you have. A long single-tail needs space and skill. A short paddle needs neither. For a first purchase shorter is the forgiving choice, and the published lengths in this family span from a hand-sized paddle to a single-tail longer than a person is tall.

On hygiene this family is a genuine split rather than a clear answer, 41 of 89 on the cleanable side. Impact toys mostly touch intact skin, so porous is defensible, with one exception worth naming: anything that breaks skin, or is used on skin that might break, is in a different category and should be silicone or nothing. Leather cannot be disinfected, and a leather flogger that has been used on broken skin cannot be made safe again for somebody else.

The cheerful note to end on is that this is the family where a small amount of money goes furthest. The difference between an unpleasant paddle and a good one is mostly stiffness and edge finish, both visible in a photograph, and neither of them expensive.

Electro-Stimulation Is a Different Purchase Entirely

53 products, the second most expensive family in the category, and the one that does not belong in the same buying conversation as everything else on this page. Everything else here is a passive object: a strap, a ball, a spring. Electro gear is a device that puts current through a body, and the questions that decide the purchase are about the unit, not about what it is made of.

The data reflects that and it is not flattering. 26 of the 53 do not declare a material, and 1 publishes a measurement. Those are the worst two figures in this guide, and part of the reason is legitimate: a stimulator is a plastic housing with metal contacts, silicone pads and rubber cable, and asking it for its material is asking a question with no single answer. The rest of the reason is that this is where the named brands are, and named-brand product data arrives as marketing copy rather than as a structured feed.

What actually decides an electro purchase

Three things, none of which appear in any specification field in our catalog. Whether the unit is single-channel or dual-channel, which decides whether you can run two independent circuits and is the main determinant of price at the top of the range. Whether the electrodes you want are compatible with the unit you buy, since connectors are not universal across manufacturers and an incompatible pairing is an expensive mistake. And whether the accessory you are adding is bipolar, meaning it completes a circuit by itself, or unipolar, meaning it needs a second electrode to work at all.

The last of those is the one that catches people, because a unipolar accessory bought alone simply does nothing and looks broken. It is written in the product descriptions when it is written anywhere, not in a field, so it is worth reading the whole description rather than scanning the table.

The one part where the material rule still applies

Electrode contacts touch skin directly, often damp skin, and they are metal or conductive silicone, which puts them on the cleanable side of the line. The figure needs care, though, and it is the sort of figure that gets quoted carelessly: 24 of the 53 products in this family are non-porous, but 26 of them declare no material at all, so what the data actually says is that almost everything here that tells you what it is made of is cleanable, and half the family tells you nothing. Conductive rubber accessories are the exception and they are also consumables, which their manufacturers say openly.

The general safety practice in this activity is well established and is not something a shop should paraphrase loosely: current stays below the waist, nothing crosses the chest, and anybody with a pacemaker or an implanted electronic device does not use this equipment at all. Manufacturers print that in their manuals and they mean it. It is the one family in this guide where the manual is not optional reading.

Why a Kit Is the Worst First Purchase

This is the section we did not plan to write. We expected kits to come out of the counting as reasonable value for a beginner, because that is what they are for, and they came out as the worst-documented corner of the entire category. Of the 37 kits and boxed sets we sell, 1 is made of a material we would put on the disinfectable side of the line, 13 do not declare their materials at all, and 2 publish a measurement of anything inside them.

The mechanism is not sinister, it is arithmetic. A kit is five or six objects sold under one product page, and a product page has one material field and one size field. Five or six objects cannot fill one field, so what goes in is either the material of the most visible item, or a phrase like assorted materials, or nothing. The specification of the box collapses to the specification of its least informative corner, every time, by construction.

Why that matters more in this category than in others

Because of what is usually in the box. The standard beginner kit is a blindfold, a pair of cuffs, a whip or paddle, a feather tickler and often a gag or a pair of clamps. Look at that list against the hygiene argument: the blindfold and the tickler are the two items where porous is genuinely fine, and the gag and the clamps are the two items where it is genuinely not. The box gives you one answer for all five, and the answer it gives is the one that suits the blindfold.

And the size problem stacks on top. Cuffs are the item in the box most likely to be the wrong size, kits publish sizing least of anything on this shelf, and a kit cuff that does not fit cannot be exchanged for a different size without returning the whole box. The two weakest points of the category, material and fit, are concentrated in the product a first-time buyer is most likely to choose.

What to do instead, for less money

Buy two pieces separately. Run it against the medians in the table above: a pair of adjustable cuffs with a published range plus a silicone gag comes to less than the median kit, and less than most of the kits on our shelf, not more. Every one of those choices comes with its own material field, its own measurement and its own return. You also end up with things you chose rather than things that came in the box, which matters more than it sounds, because a kit is assembled to look generous rather than to match one person's list.

There is one case where a kit is genuinely the right purchase, and it is worth naming rather than pretending the argument is one-sided. If the point is the gift, if the box itself is part of it, or if two people want to try five things without deciding in advance which, a kit does that and separate purchases do not. In that case buy it knowing that the gag and the clamps inside are the items to look at hardest and the ones most likely to be replaced later with something specified.

The wider point is not about kits at all. It is that in this category the amount you can find out before buying varies enormously between products that cost the same, and a habit of choosing the better-documented one will serve you better than any brand loyalty. Kits are simply where the documentation is thinnest.

Six pieces that tell you what you are buying

One per type, and the rule is the same in every card: among the pieces of that type we take the ones whose listing names a material at all, prefer a material that is typical of that family rather than an oddity, prefer the ones you can actually disinfect, and of those take the cheapest. One brand gets one card, so this is six lines and not one line six times. No kit is eligible, because a kit's material is the material of five or six different objects.

If You Are Buying Your First Piece

Everything above condensed into what to actually do, for somebody who has decided to buy something and does not want to read a table.

Buy one thing, and make it cuffs

A single pair of adjustable wrist cuffs is the piece with the most use per dollar in this whole category, it is the piece the largest family exists to sell, and it is the one where the sizing information is best. Take one that publishes an adjustment range, measure your wrist first, and pick a range that brackets your measurement with room at both ends. If you want a second item, make it a blindfold, which is inexpensive and needs no sizing at all, so it is the one purchase in this category that cannot be the wrong size.

Decide the material question once, at the start

Ask yourself a single question before you look at anything: will this ever be used by more than one person. If the answer is no, and it usually is at the start, buy whatever you like the look of and clean it sensibly. If the answer is yes or maybe, buy silicone or metal for anything that will touch a mouth, a nipple or anything that might break skin, and treat that as a rule rather than a preference. Everything in the two tables above is arranged so you can answer that in one look.

Four measurements, taken once

Wrist, ankle, neck and head. A tape measure or a strip of paper against a ruler, five minutes, written down somewhere. Those four numbers make almost every purchase in this category a decision instead of a guess, they never change, and they are the only information in the transaction that neither we nor the manufacturer can get wrong on your behalf. If you take one practical action from this page, take that one.

Skip these three at the start

Rigid metal handcuffs, because they concentrate pressure and the wearer moves. Anything electro, because it is a different purchase with its own compatibility questions and it is one of the two most expensive families we sell. And the kit, for the reasons above. None of the three is a bad product; all three are the wrong first product, and all three are common first purchases because they look like the obvious thing to buy.

And the part that is not about products

Restraint changes what the other person can do about it if something goes wrong, which is the whole point of it and also the whole responsibility of it. The ordinary practice of the activity covers this and is not complicated: agree a word before, agree a signal that works when the mouth is occupied, keep something to hand that cuts a strap, and do not leave a restrained person alone. That is not a product recommendation and there is nothing to buy for it.

Cleaning It, by Material

The practical half of the hygiene argument, in the order you will need it. None of this is exotic and most of it is one sentence per material, which is the point: the reason to decide the material before buying is that afterwards there is nothing to decide.

Silicone, metal and glass

Soap and warm water after every use, which is enough for a piece used by one person. For anything that has been in a mouth or on broken skin, or that is going to be used by somebody else, boiling water for a few minutes, or a wipe with seventy percent isopropyl alcohol. All three materials tolerate both. Metal with a plated finish is the one to watch, because plating can lift after repeated boiling, and a chipped plated surface is no longer a smooth surface; solid steel and solid silicone do not have that problem.

One warning that matters more here than anywhere else in a sex-toy catalog, because this category is full of it: silicone lubricant degrades silicone. If a piece is silicone and it is going anywhere near lubricant, use a water-based one. This catches people mostly on gags and on silicone collars, and the damage is not immediate, it is a gradual tackiness that ruins the surface over months.

Hard plastics, ABS and TPE

Soap and water, and alcohol on ABS. TPE and TPR are the exception inside the non-porous column and it is worth being honest about it: they are softer and slightly porous in a way ABS is not, so they sit at the bottom of the cleanable group rather than in the middle of it. Do not boil either; heat deforms them. On the shelf this mostly affects gag balls, and it is one of the reasons a silicone ball is the better buy than a TPE one at the same price.

Leather and vegan leather

Surface only, and the two behave differently. Vegan leather is a plastic film on a fabric backing: wipe it with a damp cloth and a little mild soap, and it comes clean because what landed on it stayed on top of it. Real leather absorbs, so a damp cloth is the most you can do and saddle soap is the traditional answer for keeping it supple; it will darken and take on a patina, which is not dirt.

For both, the thing that actually determines how long the piece lasts is drying. Put a damp cuff back in a drawer and you get mildew in the stitching and a smell you cannot get out. Hang it, let it dry in air rather than on a radiator, and store it somewhere that is not a sealed plastic box. Neither material can be disinfected, and no amount of care changes that; the routine is about the object lasting, not about making it safe to share.

Nylon, neoprene, rope and fabric

Nylon webbing and most fabric straps can go in a washing machine in a mesh bag on a cool cycle, which is more than people expect, and it is the one porous material that gets genuinely clean rather than merely wiped. Neoprene should be hand-washed and never wrung out. Cotton rope can be machine-washed in a bag and then hung under tension to dry so it does not go stiff and hairy; jute and hemp cannot be washed at all without ruining them, and are treated as single-user items by everyone who uses them.

The general rule underneath all of this is short. Anything that can be boiled, boil occasionally. Anything that cannot, dry properly and treat as one person's. And anything you cannot identify, because the listing did not say, treat as the second case, which is the practical cost of a blank material field.

What This Gear Is Not

A short section on the boundaries, because a guide that only tells you what to buy is not much of a guide.

It is not restraint that a determined person cannot escape

Almost nothing in this category is escape-proof and none of it is designed to be. Padded cuffs with a buckle come undone with enough effort, and the metal handcuffs sold here are novelty-grade rather than police-grade. That is a feature and not a shortcoming: the ability to get out is the safety margin, and gear that genuinely could not be escaped would be a different and much more dangerous product. If you are choosing between a piece that looks inescapable and one that fastens with a buckle, the buckle is the correct answer and the fantasy is doing the other work.

It is not a substitute for somebody being there

Nothing sold in this category makes it safe to restrain a person and leave. There is no quick-release mechanism that covers a fainting episode, a panic reaction or a fire, and no product page anywhere claims there is. A pair of scissors within reach is worth more than any feature in this guide, and it costs nothing.

It is not medical equipment, and two families come close enough to matter

Electro-stimulation gear resembles a TENS unit and is not one, and the manufacturers are explicit about where the current may go and who must not use it at all. Chastity devices are worn for extended periods against skin, and the ordinary guidance from the people who make them is about hygiene and circulation rather than about the fantasy. In both cases the manual is the document that matters and this page is not a substitute for it.

And a note on what the specification cannot tell you

Everything in this guide is derived from what our listings publish, which means it covers material, size, price and family, and covers nothing about how a thing feels. Whether a flogger is thuddy or stingy, whether a clamp's pressure suits you, whether a collar sits right on a particular neck: none of that is in any field, none of it is in this page, and anybody who writes it into a category guide is making it up. That part is genuinely personal and it is why the standard advice to start cheap and small is good advice.

Frequently Asked Questions

What should my first purchase be?

A pair of adjustable wrist cuffs that publishes an adjustment range, and if you want a second item, a blindfold. Between them they cost very little, neither needs any product knowledge, and the blindfold is the only thing here that cannot arrive in the wrong size. Buy them separately rather than as a kit, for the reasons set out above.

Leather or silicone?

Silicone if the piece will go in a mouth, on a nipple, or be used by more than one person, because silicone can be boiled and leather cannot be disinfected at all. Leather or vegan leather if it is yours alone and touches intact skin, where it is comfortable, durable and completely fine. That is the entire decision, and it is a hygiene decision rather than a quality one: neither material is better than the other in the abstract.

Is vegan leather worse than real leather?

Not for this purpose, and in one respect it is better. Vegan leather is polyurethane on a fabric backing, and its plastic surface wipes clean in a way a grain leather surface does not. Neither can be sterilized, because both have an absorbent backing. In our catalog the vegan version is also the more common of the two and the more expensive on average; the price difference is about what each material gets used to make rather than about the materials themselves.

The listing shows dimensions. Why does the piece not match them?

Because on 428 of our bondage listings that field is the carton, not the product. Three numbers separated by an x, in millimeters, is the shipping box coming through from a supplier feed. If you want the size of the object, look for a single measurement in centimeters, or a range, and treat the three-axis millimeter value as packaging. We can only count our own pages, but the field arrives from supplier feeds that plenty of shops use, so it is worth applying the same reading elsewhere.

How do I know if cuffs will fit?

Measure around the wrist with a tape or a strip of paper and a ruler, then buy a cuff whose published range brackets that number with room at both ends. 47 of our restraints publish a range rather than a single figure, so this is usually possible. If a cuff gives one number instead of a range, that number could be the shortest setting, the longest, or the strap laid flat, and there is no way to tell which.

What size ball gag should I buy?

The standard adult size, which is where the overwhelming majority of published diameters in our catalog cluster. Larger is a specialist purchase, because a ball that the jaw cannot close around is a gag that gets worn for two minutes. Note that a gag listing may publish the ball diameter or the strap length in the same field: a small number is the ball, a large one is the strap.

Can we share this gear between us?

Anything metal, silicone, glass or hard plastic can be shared if you clean it properly between people, meaning boiling water or an alcohol wipe rather than a rinse. Anything leather, vegan leather, neoprene, nylon, rope or fabric cannot be made safe for sharing by any method available at home, so those pieces are one person's. That is why 448 of the 929 pieces on this shelf are shareable and 347 are not, and why it is worth deciding which you are buying before you buy it.

Is a bondage kit good value?

It is good value as a gift and poor value as a first purchase. 13 of the 37 kits we sell do not declare what they are made of, 2 publish a measurement, and the cuffs inside are the item most likely to be the wrong size and the hardest to exchange on their own. Two pieces bought separately usually cost less than the median kit and come with the information the box does not have.

Why does the expensive gear tell me less?

Partly format and partly genuine difficulty. The inexpensive end of this category comes from a supplier line whose listings are generated from a structured feed, so every field gets filled. The expensive end comes from named manufacturers who supply marketing copy and photographs, which have no material field. On top of that, the expensive families are the complicated ones, and a stimulator or a swing does not have a single material to declare. The effect is real either way: 297 of 321 pieces in the cheapest third declare a material against 231 of 295 in the dearest.

Are metal handcuffs a bad idea?

As a first purchase, yes, and not for hygiene reasons: metal is one of the easiest materials to clean. A rigid band concentrates pressure on two points of a wrist that moves, which is how a comfortable evening turns into a bruise. If you want metal, look for a hinged or double-locking design that cannot ratchet tighter under struggle, and keep it for short periods.

What does breathable mean on a gag?

That the ball has holes through it, so there is an airway if the nose is blocked. It is a better design than a solid ball and it is not a safety guarantee. A gagged person cannot speak or easily signal, which is why the ordinary practice is a non-verbal signal agreed beforehand and somebody present throughout.

Does the listing tell me how a whip or flogger will feel?

No, and neither does this page. Length and material are published often enough to be useful, and they tell you how much room you need and roughly how stiff the thing is. Whether it lands as a thud or a sting is not in any field we hold, and a guide that tells you would be inventing it. Shorter and softer is the forgiving choice to start with, and this is the cheapest family in the category to be wrong in.

Which pieces here can I not clean at all?

Jute and hemp rope, realistically. Cotton rope can be machine-washed in a bag and dried under tension; the natural fiber ropes cannot be washed without ruining them, and everybody who uses them treats them as single-user items. Everything else on this shelf can at least be washed on the surface, and about half of it can be sterilized outright.

The Verdict

If this page has one argument, it is that the material field on a bondage listing is doing a job it is not advertised as doing. Everywhere else in a sex-toy catalog, material is about how something feels. Here it decides whether the piece can be brought back to a safe state after use, and therefore whether it can be shared, and therefore what you should buy. 448 of the 929 pieces on our shelf pass that test, 347 do not, and 134 do not say enough for anyone to tell.

The encouraging finding is that the shelf mostly gets this right without anybody having planned it. The objects that go somewhere delicate, gags and clamps above all, are overwhelmingly made of things you can boil. The objects that touch ordinary skin are not, and do not need to be. The two exceptions are worth remembering: restraints, which are almost exactly split down the middle and where the two halves are indistinguishable in a photograph, and kits, where the specification of five or six objects collapses into one field and the answer that comes out suits the blindfold rather than the gag.

The discouraging finding is about information rather than products. Under a third of this category publishes a measurement of the thing itself, 428 listings publish the size of the box in a field that looks like a specification, and every measure of how much a listing tells you gets worse as the price goes up. We are describing our own pages here, so the honest way to put it is that this page documents a job we have not finished, and the counting is the first part of finishing it.

For a buyer, all of that reduces to four things. Measure your wrist, ankle, neck and head once. Decide whether the piece will ever be shared, and let that decide the material rather than the other way round. Prefer a listing that publishes a range over one that publishes a number, and either over one that publishes three numbers in millimeters. And buy one good piece rather than a box of five, because in this category the box is where the information goes to disappear.

How We Counted This

Every figure on this page comes from our own live catalog on the date shown under the first table, and from nowhere else. There is no survey, no industry data and no estimate. Where we could not measure something we have said so rather than filling the gap, and the zeros in the tables are measured zeros rather than missing data.

What counts as a product

Only items that are in stock, enabled and visible in this store on the day of the count, priced as the store prices them. Out-of-stock and discontinued references are excluded, which matters because a catalog carries far more references than it has products for sale, and counting the archive instead of the shelf gives figures that describe nothing a shopper can buy.

What counts as bondage gear

The BDSM category and its subcategories hold 1064 buyable products, of which we treat 929 as bondage gear and set 135 aside: dildos, butt plugs, strokers, lingerie, body jewelry, board games and cleaning products, all of them filed under BDSM and none of them gear you restrain anybody with. That decision is made once and written into the data, so the two tables, the six cards and every number in the text are computed over the same set. The alternative, letting each table apply its own filter, is how a page ends up disagreeing with itself in ways no check catches, because each part is correct on its own.

Products are sorted into the fourteen families by reading the head of the product name, cutting it at the brand, since in this catalog the name leads with the object and then names the maker. Two samples of forty-five and forty products were read by hand to check it; the first found one error and the second found one, both fixed, which puts the residual error rate at a small number of products rather than zero. Where the name says nothing useful, the URL decides, because the slug keeps the original description.

What counts as declaring a material

A listing counts only if its material field names a material we can identify. 25 listings fill that field with something that is not a material at all, such as high-quality materials, premium materials, varied or nickel free, and those are counted as not declaring, because a field that is filled in and says nothing is worse than a blank one rather than better. Where a listing names several materials we take the first one it names, so each product appears in exactly one row of the material table and the rows add up to the total.

One correction worth recording, because it changed a conclusion we had already drafted. Our first pass counted anything containing the word leather as leather, which meant every vegan leather product was counted twice, once in each family, and made real leather look like the dominant material of the category. It is not. Real leather is the main material of 88 pieces and vegan leather of 90, and the paragraph we had written about the traditional material of bondage gear had to be rewritten to say the opposite of what it originally said.

What counts as a measurement

A figure that describes the product. The Dimensions field is deliberately excluded, because on 428 of these listings it holds the shipping carton in three axes in millimeters; the decision is made on the shape of the value rather than the name of the field, since the same field genuinely holds the product elsewhere in the catalog. Where a listing gives a range we keep the range whole rather than publishing one end of it as if it were the measurement, and 64 pieces are recorded that way.

The prices, and what is in the cards

Prices are the ones this store charges on the day of the count, taken from the pricing index rather than from the raw attribute, so they include whatever discounts are live. Medians are used throughout instead of averages, because a handful of pieces of furniture would otherwise drag every family's figure upwards. No price is written into the text by hand; every one on this page is placed by the same code that builds the tables.

The six cards are chosen by rule and not by preference: within each of the six largest families, the pieces whose listing names a material, preferring a material typical of that family and then one that can be disinfected, and of those the cheapest, with one card per brand so that the selection is six lines rather than one line six times. Kits are not eligible, because a kit's material is the material of six different objects. No opinion of ours enters the choice, and nobody pays to be in it.

Written and maintained by Lova, Loviux's AI · reviewed by the team