Love Stinks - Toxins in Vibrators

You buy organic food and carry it home from the local market in string bags. Your coffee is shade-grown and fair-trade, your water's solar-heated, and your car is a hybrid. But what about the playthings you're using for grown-up fun between those organic cotton sheets - how healthy and environmentally sensitive are they?

Few eco-conscious shoppers consider the chemicals used to create their intimate devices. Yes, those things - from vibrators resembling long-eared bunny rabbits to sleeves and rings in shapes ranging from faux female to flower power. If these seem like unmentionables, that's part of the problem: while some are made with unsafe materials, it`s tough to talk about that like, well, adults.

But it's necessary. Unlike other plastic items that humans put to biologically intimate use - like medical devices or chew-friendly children's toys - sex toys go largely unregulated and untested. And some in the industry say it's time for that to change.

Many popular erotic toys are made of polyvinyl chlorides (PVC) - plastics long decried by eco-activists for the toxins released during their manufacture and disposal - and softened with phthalates, a controversial family of chemicals. These include invitingly soft "jelly" or "cyberskin" items, which have grown popular in the last decade or so, says Carol Queen, Ph.D., "staff sexologist" for the San Francisco-based adult toy boutique Good Vibrations. "It's actually difficult for a store today to carry plenty of items and yet avoid PVC," Queen says. "Its use has gotten pretty ubiquitous among the large purveyors, because it`s cheap and easy to work with."

In recent years, testing has revealed the potentially serious health impacts of phthalates. Studies on rats and mice suggest that exposure could cause cancer and damage the reproductive system. Minute levels of some phthalates have been linked to sperm damage in men, and this year, two published studies linked phthalate exposure in the womb and through breast milk to male reproductive issues.

A study by German chemist Hans Ulrich Krieg found that 10 dangerous chemicals gassed out of some sex toys available in Europe, including diethylhexyl phthalates. Some had phthalate concentrations as high as 243,000 parts per million - a number characterized as "off the charts" by Davis Baltz of the health advocacy group Commonweal. "We were really shocked," Krieg told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Marketplace in a report on the sex-toy industry. "I have been doing this analysis of consumer goods for more than 10 years, and I've never seen such high results."