I Threw Out 5 of My 6 Sex Toys After 30 Days With One Piece of Glass

Six sex toys. That was the number. I counted them on a Sunday afternoon in February, on a hotel-issue duvet in a rental I'd booked to be alone for forty-eight hours, and the count made me feel two things at once: the first was relief — that I owned them at all, that I'd given myself permission to want anything — and the second was a small, dawning, very specific embarrassment.

Five were silicone. One was glass.

The five had cost, in total, a little over four hundred dollars, accumulated over six years through breakups, breakups again, a year of celibacy, a year of recovery from the celibacy, and the kind of "treat yourself" Black Friday emails I'd long since stopped flagging as red flags. The glass one had been a gift from a friend, three months earlier, and had cost — I checked — one hundred and twenty-nine dollars on sale. I'd left it in its case. I'd been afraid of it. It looked, to be honest, like an art object, and I didn't entirely know what I was supposed to do with an art object.

This is an essay about what happened when I unpacked it.

The math nobody does

Let's start with the part that's embarrassing, because the embarrassing part is always the part that's true.

I am thirty-seven. I have been sexually active for nineteen years. Of those nineteen years, I have spent approximately eighteen and a half believing the following sequence of things, in this order: that I was bad at sex; that the toys would help; that the toys did help; that the toys had stopped helping; that I was, possibly, broken.

The honest version of my drawer was: a Magic Wand I'd bought because everyone said to. A rabbit-style thing I'd bought because Sex and the City had implied it was the answer. Two bullet vibrators in different sizes, both purchased because I'd convinced myself that the problem was specificity. A novelty piece in pink silicone that, in fairness, had once been very entertaining.

None of them, not a single one, had ever produced what the women in the magazines I read described as a "whole-body" anything. I had assumed for a decade that this was a copywriting flourish. It is not a copywriting flourish.

An email from a friend

The friend who'd given me the glass thing had, three weeks before, sent me a one-line email I had ignored. It said, simply: "Did you ever try it?"

I had not tried it. I had told myself I would try it. I had instead tried, in approximately this order, my third attempt to date a hedge-fund analyst named Brian, two episodes of Severance, and an ill-advised cleanse.

What broke the pattern was not virtue. It was a sentence I read in a Refinery29 piece while waiting for a delayed flight in Newark. The sentence was: "Sure, your silicone dildo is cool, but have you ever tried glass?" I read it twice. Then I read the next paragraph, which was about something called temperature play, a phrase I'd previously associated with espresso.

I closed my laptop. I bought a second drink. And on the cab ride home from JFK, I texted the friend back: "Tell me everything."

What glass actually is

The Kalii — that's what the glass piece is called, made by a Dutch company called biird, which I'll come back to — is hand-blown borosilicate glass.

Borosilicate is the same material used in Pyrex, in chemistry-lab beakers, and in the bottom of the better French press carafes. It is the boring, body-safe answer to the question of what should and shouldn't go inside a person, and it has been around in this form for one hundred and thirty years. It does not absorb scent. It does not absorb temperature unless you tell it to. It cannot, contrary to a fear I held for ninety minutes after the email arrived, simply shatter inside you. The 5-year guarantee biird offers on it is, in glass-industry terms, conservative.

What it does do, that silicone does not, is conduct temperature. Run it under a warm tap for two minutes and it carries that warmth, body-faithful, for fifteen. Set it in a glass of cold water in the fridge for ten minutes and the cold lasts even longer. There is no battery. There is no charging cable. There is no "low-medium-high" setting that makes you feel, as you cycle through them, that you are operating a small, private printer.

This is the $129 object I had been afraid of.

The Dutch women who quietly figured it out

biird was founded in the Netherlands in 2020 by Andrea Rey, who had spent the prior decade working inside the sexual health industry and watching, with mounting irritation, what she described in one interview as "a category that pretends pleasure is mysterious."

What she wanted was a category that didn't. The brand's stated mission, which I would normally roll my eyes at, was to make "design-led products that don't apologize for what they are." In 2021 they launched a public petition against what they called "silent censorship" — the policy by which Meta, Pinterest, and TikTok systematically hide or take down posts about female pleasure while permitting roughly equivalent posts about male performance. The petition is real; you can still find the press release.

I tell you this because I think it matters. I have, in the last year, become much more interested in what a company believes than in what it sells. The product, in 2026, is the side effect.

First night

I tried it on a Tuesday.

It was warm in my hand — warmer than I expected, because glass takes body heat well — and heavier than I expected, which is the part nobody warns you about. The Kalii weighs one pound. This sounds like nothing. It is not nothing. The weight does the work; gravity becomes a participant. The curve, which is engineered for the G-spot, was the second surprise. The third surprise was the ribs along the shaft, which I had assumed were decorative and which are not.

I won't write the next paragraph, because no one needs that paragraph. What I will write is what I wrote in my notebook the next morning, in pencil, before I'd had coffee: "Different. Slower. Whole-body, like the magazines said. Have to recalibrate every assumption I had about my own anatomy."

The temperature thing

On night three, on instructions from my friend, I put the Kalii in a small glass of cold water in the fridge for ten minutes before bed.

I want to be cautious here, because cold is one of those words that means seventeen things, and the wrong version of cold is a panic attack. Test the temperature on your forearm first. Do not, under any circumstances, freeze it; the manufacturer is explicit about this. What you are aiming for is the temperature of a swimming pool in May. Briskly cold. The temperature of a thing you would not warm up against; the temperature of a thing you would notice.

The cold lasts, in glass, for almost the entire session. Silicone cannot do this. Silicone takes on whatever temperature your body has and stays there, sympathetically, like a co-worker who agrees with everything you say. Glass disagrees with you for a while. Glass keeps its own counsel. Glass, in this context, is — and I cannot believe I am writing this in 2026 — a more interesting personality.

The 30-day diary

What I noticed, in the first thirty days, in roughly the order I noticed it:

1. The recovery is different. A vibrator orgasm, in my experience, has the shape of a cliff. You go, you come back, you brush your teeth. A glass-and-temperature one has the shape of a hill. There's a long descent. You can keep going.
2. The clean-up is shockingly easy. You wash it. With soap. In the sink. It is non-porous. You don't think about it again.
3. The lube question is solved. Glass is compatible with every lubricant on Earth, including silicone-based ones, which silicone toys absolutely are not. I had not understood that I had spent years buying the wrong lube.
4. It is silent. No motor. No hum. No moment, mid-thing, where you remember that the upstairs neighbor exists.
5. It looks like an object. I have it on a small dish on my nightstand, next to a candle. It does not announce itself. It does not require a sock drawer. A houseguest, last week, mistook it for a paperweight.

I keep coming back to the last one. There is a thing that happens, when you have to hide a possession, where you start, slowly, to feel a little ashamed of having wanted it. The Kalii does not ask to be hidden. That alone is worth one hundred and twenty-nine dollars to me.

The purge

On day thirty-one, I emptied the drawer.

I kept the Magic Wand, because there are still nights when "the printer setting" is the correct setting. I threw away — donated, after a thorough sterilization — the rabbit, both bullets, and the novelty pink piece. They were not bad. They were not broken. They were simply solved problems I no longer had, and they were taking up space.

This essay is, I suppose, partly an apology to the women I know who have, at various points over the last six years, watched me roll my eyes at the phrase "less is more" and tell them that I was a maximalist. I was wrong. Or I was right about everything except this.

What other people say (verbatim)

I should be transparent. The reviews below are not from this magazine; they are from biird's own product page and from the US retail listing where I bought my Kalii — currently the only US retailer with reliable stock. I have copy-pasted them rather than paraphrased, because at a certain point you stop trusting your own narrator and you want to read what other people typed in their pajamas at 11 p.m.

Across 1,000+ five-star reviews on the US retail listing and 99% five-star on biird.co, the words that recur are: weight, temperature, surprise, beautiful, easy. The word that does not recur is battery.

Reviewer photographs

Real photographs, submitted by real customers to biird's review system. (No filter, no styling.) I include them not to dwell on the visual but because I find it disarming, somehow, to remember that this object exists in actual people's actual homes.

Who this is for

I want to be useful here, not promotional. Here's how I'd think about whether the Kalii is the right object for you.

It probably is, if:

• You have spent more than two hundred dollars on toys and feel diminishing returns
• You have never had what you'd call a whole-body or "internal" orgasm and you're curious whether it's an anatomy thing or a tool thing (it's a tool thing)
• You hate the maintenance of silicone — the sock drawer, the specific lubricant, the not-knowing-if-it-still-smells-fine
• You're aesthetically opposed to plastic-and-rubber objects in your bedroom
• You're partnered and you want a thing that doesn't require an instruction manual on a third date

It probably is not, if:

• You strongly prefer the soft-flesh feel of silicone (it really is a different sensation, and that preference is real)
• You require a vibration component — the Kalii has none
• You are early in your exploration of penetrative play and want something more forgiving (silicone is gentler on a learning curve)

Questions I had, answered

The price, currently

The Kalii is, as of this writing, on sale at $129 — down from $169. That's a $32 saving, and it includes the vegan-leather case, free shipping (with cart minimum), and the 5-year pleasure guarantee. I bought mine at full price three months ago. I'm not bitter.

It is, in my opinion, the only object in this category I've bought this year that I will still own in 2036. It is also — and this is the part I find most surprising about myself, the woman who used to roll her eyes at the phrase "investment piece" — the first object I've ever owned that I think of as one.