Yesterday I purposely opened up a box of phthalates. Inspired by a video from Jennifer Pritchett, owner of The Smitten Kitten, I opened up a box that had been languishing in my 2nd-floor storage room for over a year with camera in hand to show you all what I might find.

Back story: A year or so ago when I first thought up my idea of sex toy education workshops I realized I had no manky jelly sex toys to trot out like the sideshow horror they are so I went to ToySwap to see if anybody had any they’d send me. True Pleasures had a big box full of things waiting to go to a sex toy recycle center, which included dead rabbit vibrators, dismantled sex toys and some nasty jelly/pvc toys. I didn’t open up the box right away because we were due to move in less than a month. Then I didn’t get around to it because of life and no workshops planned.The box sat upstairs in our storage room, which had no A/C for the first 2 months we lived here. The box of items had also been sitting in her house for a few months before it was sent to me.

As I went through the big box of dead sex toys I encountered various results…none of them good. The star of the show was a horrid-looking tentacle dildo from a company called Zeta Paws and who knows what the material is, but there’s definitely phthalates. It behaved just like the dildos that Jennifer describes in her interview – sweating, greasy and gross. I opened the zip-lock bag and the odor was even stronger.

Then I touched it.

EW COOTIES.

Well, yeah. Pretty much. I touched it on purpose. I wanted to show the shiny grease on my fingertips. And yes, I wanted to see if my skin would have a reaction. Others had reported many various reactions to me such as peeling skin on their hands (from a sex toy store worker), bad chemical burns of the vulva and vagina, or milder reactions such as itchy skin. I only touched the dildo for a minute and only with my fingertips. I purposely didn’t wash my hands for awhile. DAREDEVIL, I know.

My contact was minimal so the skin reaction isn’t some big, obvious deformity. Keep in mind that this happened because I directly “fondled” a dildo that was sweating out toxic chemicals for only about 2 minutes followed up by not washing my hand for an hour. This photo was taken after the 1-hour mark and then I promptly washed my hands for like 5 minutes. But the damage was done. You’ll note in the larger photo that my skin shows some mottled, pink irritation but also note that my skin on the left is both shiny (from the greasy chemicals) and dry – the dryness another sign of chemical irritation. The skin on my fingertips was also stinging from the chemical irritant.

The side-effects from my brief phthalates exposure were not limited to just the skin on my fingers. I developed a headache a few hours later and chalked it up to needing more caffeine. Hours pass by after two cups of coffee and I still have a headache. Fast-forward to 18 hours later and I wake up feeling….hungover. I still have a headache and I’m in the trenches of a fibromyalgia flare-up – triggered by the phthalates. There’s no other reason for a fibro flare-up – the weather isn’t doing anything funky, I’d been sleeping well this week and generally taking it easy because of the back injury. I am tired and achey and my brain is fogged.

Please, think twice before you use that jelly, vinyl, pvc or cyberskin sex toy. I know that many manufacturers like CalEx and PipeDreams and Topco and the like are all reprinting their packaging to proclaim their toys are phthalates-free but are you really going to trust them?? I don’t. Throw out your greasy, stinky sex toys and stop buying these questionable materials from questionable manufacturers.