Traveling with a vibrator, and what happens at security

The bag goes through the scanner, an officer watches a shape cross a screen, and almost always nothing else happens. Sometimes a bag gets pulled to the side and opened, because a dense object with a motor and a battery in it looks on an X-ray like a dense object with a motor and a battery in it. An officer lifts it, looks under it, and closes the bag.

That is the whole event. Nobody announces it down the line. Screeners at a busy airport see these several times a day, and yours will not be the interesting bag of the shift.

If you are asked what it is, a personal massager is a true answer and so is a vibrator. You do not owe anybody the rest of the sentence, and the officer is not waiting for it.

The battery is what decides which bag it goes in

Every powered thing we sell is USB rechargeable, which means the battery is inside the device rather than something you drop into it. There is no loose battery to pack separately.

At the time of writing, the rule is that a lithium battery built into a device travels in the cabin with you rather than in the hold, and a loose spare battery is never allowed in checked baggage. Airlines publish their own version and it gets revised, so read the current one on the airline's own site before you fly rather than taking a dated article's word for it, this one included.

Everything else points the same direction anyway. A checked bag gets opened and searched out of your sight, spends hours somewhere you cannot hear it, and occasionally lands in a city you are not in. So it goes in the bag that stays with you.

Charge it, pack the cable, give it a pocket

• Charge it all the way the night before. A hotel is a bad place to find out the battery is flat, and a device you cannot switch on is luggage weight.
• Put the cable in the same pocket. A lot of these charge on a cable that fits nothing else you own. A front desk can find you a phone charger at midnight. It cannot find you this one.
• Give it its own pocket, and close the pocket. Loose in a bag it collects grit, rides against keys and zips that can nick silicone, and it is what falls on the floor when you dig for a passport with a line behind you.

Pack it in a cotton bag rather than a sealed plastic one. Cotton breathes and plastic holds in whatever moisture you missed. Do not press two silicone items together in one pouch either. Silicone against silicone in a warm bag can react where they touch and leave a dull sunken patch.

The one where it starts up inside a suitcase

A single button with a packed bag pressing on it will eventually get pressed. A strap tightens, a shoe shifts on landing, and the thing runs at the bottom of a case until the battery is gone.

Some devices have a lock you set by holding the button down. Our product records do not say which of ours have one, so we are not going to tell you yours does. The manual in the box will. Read that, and if there is no lock, solve it physically.

• Put it where nothing heavy sits on top of it. Not under the shoes.
• Turn the button toward the outside wall of the bag, so the pressure of everything packed around it lands on the back of the device rather than the control.
• Pack it near the top, so if it does start you can reach it without emptying a case onto an airport floor.

If it starts anyway, your bag buzzes, you open it, you press the button. That is the entire emergency. It is a machine that got switched on.

Washing it when the sink is not yours

The routine does not change on the road. Warm water, a mild unscented soap, thirty seconds with your fingers, a rinse longer than feels necessary, then dry it all the way. The long version is in how to clean and store what you own.

Hotel soap is fragranced. Fragrance leaves a film on silicone, and that film ends up against skin that reacts to more than your hands do. Bring a small unscented soap from home, the kind you put on your face.

Drying is where a trip breaks the habit. Fifteen minutes flat on a clean towel is a long time on the morning of a flight, so wash it the night before rather than during checkout. Nothing goes back in the bag damp, and nothing damp goes into a sealed plastic bag.

If the bathroom is not private, work off a cloth instead of a tap. Sliquid's Shine Toy Cleaner is the one we keep for that, made with organic botanicals, for silicone, glass, and steel. Put it on the cloth rather than on the device, then go over it with a clean damp cloth. It does not clean better than soap. It is faster, and it does not need a running tap.

The one that cannot go under a hotel tap

The Doxy Go is the one powered thing we sell that does not say waterproof anywhere. It is a compact cordless wand with a body-safe silicone head, and away from home it is the awkward one, because a hotel bathroom is exactly where you will be tempted to hold it under a running tap and call it done.

Not this one. Wipe the head with a damp cloth and a little mild soap, go over it again with a clean damp cloth, then dry it. The body never goes near water. No bath, no shower, no sink.

Every other powered thing on our shelf states waterproof, so this is the one device where the away-from-home routine is genuinely different. If it is the one you own, pack a cloth.

What fits in a carry-on in a bottle, and what does not

At the time of writing, a container in the bag that goes through the scanner with you has to be 3.4 fl oz or smaller, which is 100 ml. That is a rule, and rules move, so check the current one before you go.

The Everyday Vulva Moisturizer clears the limit as it stands, and most of the rest of the shelf does not. We do not sell a travel size of any of the lubricants or of the cleaner, and that gap is ours rather than yours. Decant into a small bottle you already own, put the full bottle in a checked bag, or buy a small one where you land.

The Hydrating Melts are individually wrapped, so a few go in a bag and the carton stays home. They are melting suppositories, and that is not a figure of speech. A checked bag on a hot tarmac, or a trunk in Miami in August, will reach them through the wrapper.

Which of ours the catalog calls travel friendly

Three of them, and it is worth being exact about which.

• The Gemma Turbo is a slim bullet in body-safe silicone, waterproof and USB rechargeable. Our catalog calls it the easiest to travel with, and it is the easiest shape to find a pocket for.
• The Lemon Crush is a palm-sized air pulse stimulator in body-safe silicone, fully waterproof and USB rechargeable, and the catalog says small enough to travel with.
• The Next Liberty is the flagship of the air pulse range, fully waterproof and USB rechargeable, and the catalog calls it travel-friendly.

Everything else we sell travels perfectly well. Those three are the ones where the word is on the page, and we are not going to hand it to the others.

Now the part that costs us the sale. None of this is a reason to buy a second device for trips. The one you already own and already know how to use is the better traveler, and a charged battery in a closed pocket closes most of the gap. If you were about to buy something because a page called it travel-friendly, that is the purchase we would rather you skipped.

Hotels, housekeeping, and a room you are sharing

Housekeeping has seen one. That is not the reason it goes back in the bag. Anything left on a bed leaves with the sheets in the laundry cart, and it does not come back.

Vibration travels through whatever it is resting on. A device running on a hard nightstand puts sound into the nightstand and the wall behind it. In your hand, on a bed, it does much less of that. If the walls are thin, that is the variable you can change.

One product we sell says anything at all about noise. The Pleasure Air Pro states that it is quiet enough not to announce itself. The rest may well be the same. We do not have it from their makers in writing, so we are not going to promise it to you the night before you find out through a hotel wall.

Sharing a room is its own answer. Put it in the bag, in a pocket that closes. If there is no door between you and another adult, the honest answer is that some trips are not the trip for it.

The laws where you are going are not ours to keep a list of

This is the one part of the page that is not about being embarrassed.

A small number of countries prohibit these outright. In those places a device in a bag is a customs matter, and the cost is not a red face at a baggage carousel. It is the device taken at best, and at worst a woman answering questions in a room in a country whose language she does not speak.

We are not going to print a list. A list published here would be right on the day it was written and quietly wrong within a year, and the person paying for our stale line at that counter would be you rather than us.

What to do instead takes about ten minutes.

• Search the destination country's own government customs pages for prohibited and restricted goods, not a travel forum or a listicle.
• Look up any country you connect through, not only the one you are going to.
• If you cannot get a clear answer from an official source, leave it at home. Nothing on our shelf is worth that conversation.

Flying inside the United States is not this conversation. One thing worth knowing separately: we cannot ship a stimulation device to Alabama or Mississippi, because state law puts the category out of reach there, so an order from either gets refunded rather than shipped. What that means for something already packed in your own case is a question for somebody who knows the law in that state, not for a shop.

Pain does not wait until you are home

Being three time zones from your own doctor does not change what is worth an appointment.

Pain during sex, burning, bleeding, itching that will not settle, or anything that changed suddenly rather than slowly, all belong in front of somebody who can examine you, and that is as true in a hotel as it is at home. A trip is not a reason to sit on it until you are back.

If something starts while you are away, stop using the device. A pharmacist is a reasonable first stop in most places and will tell you plainly if you need a doctor instead. Do not reach for more lubricant to get through the week either. A lubricant makes friction easier, which is what makes it good at burying something a doctor should look at.

Nothing we sell is a treatment for any of that, and nothing on this page is medical advice.

Tonight, before the bag is zipped

Charge it, put the cable in the same pocket, put both in a cotton bag, and put that in the case that stays with you rather than the one you check.

Then open the customs page for the country you are flying into and read what it prohibits. That second part is ten minutes, and it is the only part of this where getting it wrong has a real cost.