Seven Things You Need For Your New Sex Doll (and A Few Bonus Extras)
After placing your order for your new sex doll, unless you purchased an in stock doll, there’s always going to be a bit of a wait – and this is a good time to get things ready for your doll’s arrival.
On arrival day as soon as you open the box, you’re going to want to remove your doll and set her up, maybe dress her up. Ideally, the things listed below should already be waiting, because as soon as you connect the head to the body, the last thing you want to be doing is going out on little side missions to find these items.
The first seven sex doll essentials are for dolls made of silicone or TPE, with an eighth essential that is only for dolls made from TPE.
We don’t have any association with any of the brands listed below, we just mention them as these are the brands that, after more than seven years of dealing with love dolls, make products in their class that are useful and have been so far tested as doll safe.
Remember that blends of both silicone and TPE can vary between sex doll brands, manufacturers and even batches, so we do remind you that any substance should always be tested on an inconspicuous area of the doll before using liberally.
Water Wipes
Baby wipes are useful for a wide variety of applications for sex dolls, including using in conjunction with cleaning agents, diluting cleaning agents (see below), applying mineral oil and removing loose surface debris.
A brand new doll from a sex doll factory may have what we call factory residue (dust and similar grime), so giving a newly arrived doll a wipe down with baby wipes is a good idea.
We’ve found that the best wipes for using on dolls, whether silicone or TPE, are the Water Wipes brand. These were developed specifically to be extremely non allergenic, for the widest applications on babies with very sensitive skin, and have also so far been useful for cleaning the surfaces of dolls.
Paper Towels
Sex dolls absolutely must never be left damp, wet, or with any damp areas or patches anywhere. Paper towels from any brand are your doll’s best friend when it comes to maintaining their much needed dryness.
This includes after wiping them down with baby wipes as mentioned above. The areas that you wipe down should ideally have paper towels applied to them to absorb any moisture left behind. The paper towels should stick to the damp areas until they dry, after which time the paper towels will just fall off, or come away from the doll’s surface.
In some cases, for TPE dolls, the doll’s oil content will cause the paper towel to stick to the surface of the skin. An oily patch on the paper towel is a good sign, which shows that the doll has a healthy amount of mineral oil inside, which most of the time means that the area is soft and supple.
Baby Powder
The surfaces of sex dolls can become tacky and/or sticky over time, and a quick check on the skin’s surface will tell you if the doll needs powdering or not.
Giving your doll a pat down with baby powder may eliminate dust and other airborne debris from accumulating on the surface. A smoother, dry, powdered surface also makes dressing a doll much easier, as the sleeves and other areas of clothing glide much easier over a powdered doll than a sticky one.
There have been some long standing debates about which is better, or safer, for a doll – talcum based powder or corn starch based powder. We’ve seen fears expressed about both substances. Some say that talcum powder is carcinogenic (dangerous for humans), while others claim that corn starch based powders are “food for bacteria” (dangerous for your doll).
Regulations, including self regulation of companies, have partly made that debate moot, since many companies have taken talcum based baby powder off the market. In New Zealand, most of the supermarket baby powders you find are cornflour based, though you can still purchase talcum powder from some places, such as pharmacies.
The fears about cornstarch promoting bacterial growth are mostly relevant if you break the dampness rule – make sure your doll is dry when powdering her. One rule you should try to follow no matter which you buy is that you want the purest kind of baby powder possible – with minimum scents, perfumes and other additives.
The main differences between cornstarch based and talc based baby powders are that cornstarch leaves TPE feeling very velvety smooth to the touch, while talcum powder leaves TPE feeling silkier.
You may find references while researching online that you should apply the powder with a brush. We’ve always found that applying it by hand eliminates the risk of scratching the surface of the doll with the brush’s bristles (unless you’re using a very expensive Kolinsky makeup brush), and gives you the added benefit of controlling exactly where the powder goes.
Applying the powder by hand also gives you the ability to feel where the doll’s surface is still tacky and needs an extra bit of powder – essentially where you may have missed a spot.
A Tangle Teezer Brush
Most sex dolls do come with hair brushes or combs of some kind, but these are similar to the thin speaker wires you get with a new music system. They’ll do the job if you don’t have anything else, but there are far better third party options.
Since tangled wigs are a massive source of complaint from many people who have life sized dolls, there is an almost silver bullet against tangling – The Tangle Teezer.
These are wide brushes with soft plastic teeth designed for stubborn hair. You can find them at Farmers, and you only need the very basic one.
While a Tangle Teezer might not be able to solve every tangle problem, they are very effective in both preventing tangles and smoothing out the wig. Giving a doll’s wigs a regular brushing with a Tangle Teezer also keeps them soft and well conditioned.
Water Based Lubricant
It’s difficult, if not impossible, to get busy with a sex doll without lubricant, and you can’t use silicone lube, or any other kind of lube with exotic ingredients. The silicone factor is very real, and TPE reacts very badly with silicone anything. Silicone dolls themselves don’t like silicone lubricant, and you do not want to trash your precious doll for the want of the right stuff.
That stuff is water based lubricant, and there are various grades. The one that we recommend the most is from Love Honey, called Discover. The Discover lubricant was created for anal, and is especially formulated to have high viscosity that doesn’t dry out.
This function designed to prevent adventurous couples having to reapply while balls deep searching for brown treasure has an unexpected side effect of lasting a long time for doll sex.
You still might need to apply the odd bit now and then, but for some reason, this formulation plays very well on the surface of synthetic vaginas. Whichever brand you choose, though, remember to only use water based lubricant.
Hydrogen Peroxide
You want to keep your doll as clean and bacteria free as possible, and though TPE is the one that people worry about a lot, with TPE being porous, silicone dolls can still have bacteria neighbourhoods growing on their surfaces.
Hydrogen peroxide was recommended to us when we first got into the business of sex dolls, and it’s a substance that many people rely on for surface sanitisation.
We recommend the Home Essentials brand that you can find at many pharmacies and supermarkets, and our testing has shown that either 3% or 6% is safe for both silicone and TPE.
The technique we would use is to wet a Water Wipe with the Hydrogen Peroxide and wipe liberally across the surface you want to clean.
This should always be followed up by several Water Wipe applications without anything else on them, so that you wipe away the residue of the Hydrogen Peroxide. The Hydrogen Peroxide might be effective for killing germs, but once it’s done its job, you want to wipe it off the surface.
Once you’ve wiped the residue of Hydrogen Peroxide off with Water Wipes (or a damp cloth), make sure you then apply paper towels to any damp area to absorb any moisture.
Once a silicone doll is completely dry, you can remove the paper towels. For a TPE doll, you may want to rehydrate the area by applying a small amount of mineral oil. This area will then need to be powdered once the mineral oil is absorbed.
Socks and Shoes
Dolls that spend most of their time lying down on a bed should have socks on their feet to protect them. If they spend any amount of time standing, or are moved around, they will want to have socks and shoes.
A common type of damage to life sized dolls is shredded feet from them being moved, bumped, or even dragged across the floor.
We only ever recommend lifting and carrying them with their feet clear of the ground, but as it’s not always possible to do this (and they will have to come to a standing position anyway) it’s best to give them socks and shoes to wear to keep their feet safe.
If the shoes are for safety only, then a pair of sneakers would suffice. The Warehouse and Cotton On are both good sources for low priced sneakers that are plain and sturdy.
Dolls from WM Dolls come with little slip on sneakers that will suffice for protection while moving and standing.
For TPE Dolls Only: Mineral Oil
TPE sex dolls have a complex composition that is partly made up of mineral oil. It’s this oil that gives the dolls their spongy, soft, slightly moist feel – and this is evidenced when they leave oil marks on surfaces and clothing.
With time, and when you do things like clean them with chemicals, the oil does deplete and needs to be replaced.
Every doll brand uses a different blend of TPE for their dolls, so their rehydration needs differ widely. Some need to be oiled once a year, some every six months. Failing to do so may lead to certain areas drying out.
Dolls made from STPE are less prone to drying, as their chemical structure is far more robust than plain TPE.
After spending a bit of time with your TPE doll, you will come to know from touch if there is a need for oiling, for example if the surface of the skin feels overly dry or firmer than usual.
Baby oil can be used, but because it contains scent, and therefore isn’t pure, we recommend the pure mineral oil that you can purchase right here at Pure Nature. Their mineral oil is super slick and glides on smoothly.
You can use either their cosmetic grade mineral oil or their food grade mineral oil, which is formulated for anything that might come into contact with food, or your mouth.
NEVER use Vaseline or any petroleum jelly on a TPE doll. People will say it’s required, and make this claim on the basis that “it’s just mineral oil at a higher viscosity” but it’s not the same as food or cosmetic grade mineral oil, and it’s been tested and proven to degrade TPE with only one application. Do not risk it.
Honourable Mentions:
Zoono
Zoono is an all purpose cleaning agent that can be sprayed onto a surface or used as a foaming hand sanitiser. It’s available directly from the company that manufactures it here in New Zealand.
The powerful surface spray is formated to kill almost every type of virus, bacteria and mould spore, and is rated to be effective for up to thirty days. The foaming hand sanitiser is the one we’ve tested on WM Dolls TPE to see how the TPE reacts. The hand sanitiser is safer than the surface spray, as the active ingredient is only 10% of the concentration of the surface spray.
It’s worth looking at if you want something that is clinically proven to be very strong against germs. There may be no mention of sex toys or the like on the Zoono Website, but the site does talk about regular plastic toys, which lie around the floor a lot of the time, so make what you will of that.
Like the Hydrogen Peroxide, test it first, and if you do use it on a doll, always wipe immediately afterwards with a baby wipe and then dry.
A Memory Foam Pillow
For a doll that spends time lying on a bed, or sitting on a chair, the compression can have a tendency to flatten the doll’s buttocks.
While not a complete Panacea against flat butt syndrome, a memory foam pillow may be a good way to slow this process down. The technique is very simple – Just place the memory foam pillow on the bed or surface where the doll will lie or sit, and make sure that you position the doll’s buttocks directly onto the memory foam pillow.