What Drives Sex Toy Popularity? A Morphological Examination of Vaginally-Insertable Products Sold by the World’s Largest Sexual Wellness Company

Figures & data

Table 1. Variables used in the analysis of products labeled “dildo” collected from the Lovehoney UK website (www.lovehoney.co.uk).

Variable name	Description and method of collection
Circumference (inches)	The measurement of the girth of each product at its largest point taken from the website product specification.
Customer Engagement (to two decimal places)	The Number of Reviews divided by the number of months between Earliest Review and the month of data collection (January 2021), provides a rate of Customer Engagement. This ranged from 0.03 to 7.46 reviews per month.
Earliest Review	The date of the first product review. Used to indicate the length of availability for each product. This was then used to calculate Customer Engagement (see above).
Insertable Length (inches)	The length of the shaft that could be used for vaginal insertion excluding any additional features e.g., a scrotum. Taken from the product specification.
Material (Realistic and Unrealistic)	Realistic materials included PVC, Silicone and Soft Plastic. Unrealistic materials included Glass, Latex, Metal, Stainless Steel and Wood. Taken directly from onsite descriptions for each product.
Number of Reviews	How many customers had reviewed each product (n = 17,590).
Website’s Popularity Rating	Products in the dildo category were filtered using the onsite filtering tool by the category “popularity.” Each item was then assigned a Popularity Rating of 265 to 1, in order of appearance, with a higher number denoting they were more popular.
Price	The cost of each item. For items on sale their full retail price was used.
Realistic Skin Color	Assessed using the image associated with each product. A product was defined as having a realistic skin color if it matched a known shade of human skin.
Star Rating	An average of all the star ratings given alongside more detailed customer reviews of the products. A scale of 1 to 5 stars to one decimal place, where 5 is highest achievable score.
Other Features Glans/Coronal Ridge Scrotum Veins Vibrating feature	Each of these features were determined by visual assessment of product photos and/or by reading the product description. These were noted on a presence-absence basis.

Table 2. Factor loadings from principal component analysis (PCA) resulting in the single factor Overall Popularity.

Popularity Measures	PCA Overall Popularity (Eigen Value = 1.38; 46.23%)
Z-score: Star rating	0.273
Z-score: Customer Engagement	0.839
Z-score: Website Popularity Rating	0.780

Table 3. Regression results (Models 1–3) with Overall Popularity (from the PCA) as the dependent variable.

Model		B	Std. Error	B	t	p
1
	Insertable Length (in)	0.013	0.052	0.023	0.253	.800
	Circumference (in)	−0.154	0.067	−0.206	−2.311	.022
2
	Insertable Length (in)	0.002	0.053	0.004	0.044	.965
	Circumference (in)	−0.182	0.073	−0.244	−2.489	.013
	Realistic Material	0.182	0.235	0.060	0.776	.439
	Skin colored	−0.090	0.160	0-.045	−0.563	.574
	Veins	0.579	0.240	0.254	2.417	.016
	Scrotum	−0.305	0.160	−0.147	−1.908	.058
	Glans	−0.114	0.274	−0.042	−0.414	.679
	Vibrating	−0.178	0.158	−0.077	−1.128	.260
3
	Insertable Length (in)	0.034	0.052	0.059	0.655	.513
	Circumference (in)	−0.176	0.071	−0.235	−2.473	.014
	Realistic Material	0.109	0.229	0.036	0.477	.634
	Skin colored	0.002	0.157	0.001	0.013	.990
	Veins	0.454	0.235	0.199	1.932	.055
	Scrotum	−0.239	0.156	−0.115	−1.527	.128
	Glans	−0.146	0.267	−0.054	−0.548	.584
	Vibrating	−0.098	0.154	−0.042	−0.636	.526
	Price	−0.008	0.002	−0.249	−3.935	<.001

Table 4. Regression results (Model 4) with Price as the dependent variable.

Model		B	Std. Error	B	t	p
4
	Insertable Length (in)	4.069	1.637	0.221	2.486	.014
	Circumference (in)	0.630	2.272	0.026	0.277	.782
	Realistic Material	−10.342	7.121	−0.108	−1.452	.148
	Skin colored	12.007	4.961	0.187	2.420	.016
	Veins	−16.141	7.449	−0.223	−2.167	.031
	Scrotum	8.802	4.959	0.133	1.775	.077
	Glans	−5.333	8.385	−0.063	−0.636	.525
	Vibrating	11.300	4.812	0.153	2.348	.020