The case for dental dams is simple: Although many people consider oral sex to be a low risk activity, it can still transmit STIs. But dental dams have never been popular with the general public — and their low sales have hampered the very product innovation that might make them a sexier, more affordable, and generally more appealing safer sex product.

Inventing a new safer sex device is pricey

It’s not just a matter of whether dental dams are profitable. Inventing a new safer sex device is pricey. All safer sex devices are required to have FDA approval, a process that doesn’t come cheap. While traditional dental dams already have the okay, anyone looking to do a revamp — like, for instance, Lorals, a black latex panty billed as “lingerie for oral sex” — will end up spending close to $100,000 just to confirm that their product is as effective at preventing STI transmission as all other latex safer sex devices.

Dental dams exist because it’s easy to transmit some STIs, like herpes and gonorrhea from one partner’s mouth to another’s vulva; they are equally at home in either set of mucus membranes. They’re also used for analingus, which has its own set of risks, including exposure to pathogens not normally associated with sex, like giardia and hepatitis A. And that’s why the FDA’s involved: so the makers of these products demonstrate that they work.

But for Lorals creator Melanie Cristol, that expensive production process has created a few headaches. Cristol was inspired to create Lorals out of a personal need. Using a dam, she tells me, can feel “insulting,” noting that it can feel awkward, uncomfortable, and downright mood-killing to use what she thinks of as “this flappy little sheet.”

Cristol wants people to feel as sexy as they feel safe — but because she’s still raising the funds to secure FDA approval, she can’t yet make health claims about her product. Instead, the product is presented as a way for women who feel uncomfortable with their vulvas to ease into oral sex. Though Cristol hopes that this strategy will help make Lorals popular enough for her to pay for the FDA-approval process, it’s an awkward strategy that undermines Cristol’s body-positive mission.

Why has no one deemed it worth the investment?

But even if the FDA process is prohibitively expensive for indie innovators like Cristol, why aren’t major companies like Church & Dwight or Glyde Health — which manufacture the leading brands in dental dams — investing some of their R&D budgets in making safer oral sex feel sexier? If a sexier dam could truly transform how we think of safer oral sex, why has no one deemed it worth the investment?

Dental dams could benefit from a makeover. Dental dams actually began as surgical tools, and were repurposed for safe sex. But unsexiness alone probably isn’t the major reason for their failure to launch. When people consider safer sex a priority, its inherent sexiness follows. Condoms have also been plagued by a reputation for killing the mood — but when the alternative was potentially contracting HIV, people found a way to make condoms feel sexy. According to Julia Bennett, director of learning strategy and education at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, people who use barrier methods “rate their sexual experiences as just as pleasurable as those who don’t.”

Relying on consumer interest, rather than safer sex education, to spark a dental dam revolution is an iffy strategy. Coyote Amrich, director of purchasing at San Francisco sex shop Good Vibrations says that though the store has carried creative takes on the dental dam in the past (including a latex panty, kind of like Lorals), the products never seem to generate enough sales to stay on the market for long. These low sales further depress interest in dental dam R&D: why devote time and money to improving a product few people want to buy?

But if sexier dams aren’t the solution, what is? Dental dam use is relatively high among queer women and their sexual partners. But it’s not because this population has access to some special, sexy type of dam. Instead, it’s a greater awareness of dams and a sense of social responsibility that seem to drive the higher rate of dam use.

“Something you do to show that you care about your partners”

Many queer and transgender people who use dental dams do so because safer oral sex is “something you do to show that you care about your partners,” even if STI risk is known to be low, says Chris Barcelos, an assistant professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who researches queer safer sex practices. Barcelos’ research suggests that dental dams aren’t more popular with queer people because oral sex carries more risk for them than it does for straight people. They’re more popular because the queer community places a higher priority on safer oral sex than the mainstream, straight world does.

No matter how fantastic an improvement Lorals may be on the traditional dental dam, a better dam alone won’t spark a safer oral sex revolution. Until we start caring about safer oral sex, dental dams are always going to be a fringe product. No matter how much R&D companies do to make the product feel sexier, it won’t become mainstream until most of us truly consider it necessary.

When it comes to public health, what we want doesn’t always line up with what we need. That’s how you wind up with the Lorals advertising campaign, which shames women for their natural scent instead of promoting a product that could actually make sex safer.