Are expensive sex toys better? Generally, yes. Maybe. Quite often. But there are some enormous caveats, so before you go spending your life savings on sex toys, you might want to read this.
Having used well over 100 sex toys at this point, I’ve noticed something fairly predictable: the toys that stay in my bedside drawer tend to be the more expensive ones.
Not always. I’ve used expensive sex toys that sadly did absolutely nothing for me, and cheaper toys that have given me perfectly good orgasms. But if I plotted everything I’ve tested on a graph, I’m pretty sure there would be a correlation between price, brand reputation and how highly I rated the toy.
The interesting question isn’t really whether expensive toys are better, though. It’s how much better they are, and whether that difference is worth paying for.
What Does ‘Expensive’ Actually Mean?
There’s an enormous difference between a £30 vibrator and a £300 one, and even the brands I think of as ‘premium’ cover a surprisingly wide price range
At the top end, LELO is probably the most consistently expensive mainstream brand I use, with many of its toys sitting somewhere between £100 and £300. Womanizer also sits firmly in premium territory, although it mainly focuses on clitoral suction toys, with simpler models under £100, the Next Liberty around £120 and the flagship Womanizer Next close to £190.
Lovense is harder to categorise because virtually nothing seems to sell at its official RRP and prices vary much more between products.
The Lovense Domi 2 for example, can usually be bought for around £79, which I think is genuinely good value for such a powerful wand. No, £79 isn’t cheap when Lovehoney’s classic mains-powered wand is around £50 and rechargeable Amazon wands can be found for £30-ish, but having used plenty of cheaper wands, the Domi 2 is considerably better. My second-favourite wand, the LELO Switch, costs roughly twice as much. Other Lovense toys climb well into three figures.
The Lovense Fizz clitoral suction toy is roughly £100-£110 and the LELO SONA 3 around £129.
Then you have brands like Svakom, which I’d put firmly in the mid-high range. A lot of its toys fall somewhere around £50-£100, and it has a broad range of vibrators, rabbits, masturbators and app-controlled toys. In my experience, they’re usually well made and offer plenty of features and a decent app without quite reaching LELO pricing.
Smile Makers sits lower again, often around £30-£50. Its toys are generally simpler, but I’ve found them very decent for the money and particularly good for beginners who don’t need app control, multiple motors or a dozen clever settings.
Lovehoney’s own-brand range covers a similarly broad middle ground, while So Divine, Satisfyer, rose toys and some of the fruit-shaped suction toys often sit towards the cheaper end. Many of those can be picked up for under £30, while generic white-label products from Amazon and less reputable online retailers can cost even less.
So rather than there being a neat divide between ‘cheap’ and ‘expensive’, there’s really a sliding scale. You might pay £25 for a basic suction toy, £40-£60 for something simple but decent from an established brand, £70-£120 for a better-engineered mid-range or premium toy, and £150-£300 at the luxury end.
And no, I don’t think a £190 Womanizer gives you an orgasm six times better than a £30 toy. It is generally a better toy, though.
What Are You Actually Paying More For?
The biggest difference becomes obvious when there are premium materials being used, or a motor involved.
More expensive toys from established brands will be body safe, often using buttery soft silicone, glass or stainless steel rather than cheap unsafe materials, or technically-safe-but-not-premium feeling ABS, or silicone-coated hard plastic.
They also tend to have stronger, smoother and more reliable motors, better noise control and more refined settings.
A cheap vibrator can be extremely powerful, sometimes aggressively so, but premium toys are generally better at making that power feel deep and rumbly rather than surface-level and buzzy. They’re also designed to last longer, and will often be backed up by a decent one, three or five year guarantee.
Clitoral suction toys are a really good example. I’ve tried cheap fruit-shaped suction toys, including the Lemon and Strawberry toys, and yes, they can absolutely give you an orgasm.
Put one next to the Womanizer Next, though, and the difference is obvious. The Womanizer is quieter, smoother, has better controls and is more comfortable to use. It feels more refined and considerably less like it’s attempting to vacuum your clit off. I’ve also compared five Womanizer models side by side, from the £69 Starlet 3 to the £190 Next, and the same pattern is pretty obvious within the brand itself: you’re not necessarily paying for a completely different sensation, but you are paying for better controls, quieter performance and more useful features.
App control is another area where I think paying more can be justified. Companies such as Lovense aren’t just selling the vibrator itself; they’ve invested in apps, connectivity, remote control, firmware updates and the ability to sync different products together. Conversely, some of the cheap apps I’ve downloaded have been absolutely terrible.
Established manufacturers also spend money developing prototypes, refining shapes, testing motors and producing their own designs rather than simply buying a generic product and putting a different logo on it. That’s where you get true innovation – like the ability to change the depth of suction or the afterglow setting on the Womanizer Next, the LED light therapy on the LELO MONA Spectra or the dynamic thrusting on the LELO INA Thrust.
You don’t have to care about any of that if a £30 toy gives you exactly what you want, but it helps explain why two toys that are very similar to look at can feel completely different when they’re actually in use.
Expensive Toys Can Still Be Rubbish
The major downside of paying more is that your expectations rise with the price. If a £20 vibrator is a bit noisy but gets you off, you’re probably going to think you’ve done quite well. If you’ve spent £220 and the design is irritating or you can’t orgasm with it at all, you’re understandably going to be much less forgiving.
I’ve had several expensive disappointments. Most recently, the LELO Tiani Twist did very little for me despite coming from one of the most expensive mainstream sex toy brands, while we found having sex with the LELO Surfer 2 uncomfortable because of the shape of its base. That’s the sort of thing you might shrug off in a £20 butt plug, but you don’t particularly expect it at a premium price.
The We-Vibe Unite cost more than £100 and I thought it was absolute rubbish, and I’m still bitter about it years later.
So no, buying from an expensive or established brand does not guarantee that you’ll love the toy. Bodies are different, designs don’t work equally well for everyone, and sometimes an expensive toy simply isn’t very good.
On the other hand, the most expensive women’s sex toy I’ve tried is probably the LELO Enigma Double Sonic. It has a full RRP of almost £300 and almost annoyingly, it really is excellent.
It’s one of my favourite toys. Admittedly I still reach for my Womanizer Next more often because it’s so much more convenient, but the Enigma has given me some of the best orgasms of my life, which to some people will be well worth the price.
What About Dildos And Butt Plugs?
If you’re buying a straightforward dildo or set of generic butt plugs, there’s no motor to make quieter, battery to improve or app to develop. If it’s made from a suitable body-safe material, has a safe shape, is well finished and has the dimensions and feel you want, a perfectly ordinary silicone dildo from somewhere like Lovehoney may do the job just as well as something substantially more expensive.
There is an important exception here, before the specialist silicone enthusiasts come for me.
There are companies designing their own toys, creating their own moulds and casting silicone by hand in relatively small quantities. They might offer unusual fantasy designs, enormous size ranges, different firmnesses and custom colour combinations, and those products are naturally going to cost more because you’re paying for specialist design and small-scale manufacturing.
If you specifically want a hand-poured tentacle in three colours and approximately the dimensions of a traffic cone, that’s a rather different purchasing decision.
But if you simply want a standard six-inch silicone dildo to use occasionally, you probably don’t need to spend £100 on one.
Brand Matters, But RRP Doesn’t Tell You Everything
I probably trust price and brand reputation together more than price alone.
There are plenty of newer ‘brands’ that arrive in the sex toy market positioning themselves as ‘luxury’ from day one. It’s a tempting business model; put a generic white label vibrator in pretty packaging, build a minimalist website spouting nonsense about wellness and charge £140 for it, and consumers will naturally assume it must be considerably better than something costing £35. Similar to the Veblen effect for luxury goods.
Personally, I would rather spend my own money on an established brand with a track record, proper customer service and a decent guarantee.
These days, Lovehoney own-brand is probably about as cheap as I generally go when choosing toys to review, partly because there are only so many generic vibrators one woman needs to test in the name of science and I know the site is trustworthy.
That doesn’t mean I think you should blindly pay the full RRP for LELO, Womanizer or Lovense either.
Major brands and retailers run substantial sales, offer affiliate commissions and hand out discount codes with impressive regularity. That doesn’t tell us exactly what a toy costs to manufacture because the selling price also has to cover development, packaging, staff, distribution, marketing, warranties and retailer margin, but clearly the recommended retail price isn’t the absolute minimum these companies can afford to sell them for.
And this is probably where I land on the whole cheap-versus-expensive argument:
I Don’t Think You Need To Buy The Most Expensive Sex Toy
I do think it’s often worth moving out of the cheapest price bracket.
A £100-£150 premium toy may be noticeably better than a £25 Amazon version, but that doesn’t mean you should pay £150 if it regularly appears in sales for £90 and you can use one of our discount codes to make it even cheaper.
For me, that’s often the sweet spot: buy something genuinely good from an established brand, preferably when it’s discounted.
I’ve tested £100+ toys that couldn’t give me an orgasm and £25 toys that absolutely could, but ultimately the toys I continue using long after I’ve finished reviewing them are disproportionately Womanizer, LELO and Lovense rather than £20 Amazon specials – and that probably tells you more than the price tag does.
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