The world’s first shower head sex toy has launched to break taboos around masturbation

A shower head specifically designed for masturbation has launched. Nope, this is not a drill. Sexual wellness and pleasure brand Womanizer – y’know: the ones who dropped a sex toy collab with Lily Allen pre-pandemic and the brains behind the Inside Out clitoral vibrator – has teamed up with premium bathroom products manufacturer hansgrohe to drop a revolutionary new sex toy. And it’s so. Good.

They’re aiming to break the taboo of conversations around masturbation (which is very normal and very good for you, FYI) by introducing it into everyday objects. Niche, but we’re kind of here for it. And they’re starting with one shower head at a time.

Let’s rewind a few steps. Three years ago, Womanizer conducted some thorough market research around sexual wellness and masturbation, which highlighted that many women and people with vulvas have long been using their shower head to masturbate. Mid-body polish. 61% of women, in fact. As many as 40% of women remembered that the first time they did so was before they turned 18; nearly two in five women (39%, to be exact), are masturbating in the shower at least once a month.

But there was a problem: bog-standard shower heads weren’t really cutting the mustard. You can’t easily adjust the pressure, the pressure is – for the most part – not high enough, and sometimes it can be uncomfortable. So two German Pioneers of its industries joined hands.

Hansgrohe bought their their years of experience in sleek, precision engineering to the table, and Womanizer came with their experience in pleasure, trailblazing new technologies (pleasure air technology, for example) and knowing what women want.

Together, they conducted nine research projects and 60 interviews over the course of three years, testing over 100 samples in the process. They collected 4,000 (!) responses to questionnaires and released two prototype iterations. They’d had an idea, but the team had to understand what a masturbation shower head would look like – and how it would work in different countries across the globe to ensure as many sexually empowered women as possible would be able to use it.