Higher Vibrations: The Weird, Woozy World of Crystal Sex Toys
From the bowels of the earth, straight to your nether regions.
By Elle Carroll
Credit: Chakrubs
Step aside, beloved Hitachi magic wand. Your old-school silicone is no good here.
Ok, maybe that’s an exaggeration. But crystal sex toys have gone mainstream, meaning masturbation is no longer a plug-and-play game with a predictable desired outcome. Thanks to some high vibrations from the bowels of the earth, getting yourself off is now a lofty metaphysical and spiritual endeavor where clit and chakra happily coexist.
The ongoing niche shift from skeevy store to spiritual enlightenment is thanks in part to Vanessa Cuccia, founder of crystal sex toy company Chakrubs. Her site claims it is the first shop of its kind, although it’s no longer the only sexual and spiritual wellness shop in town.
Brands like Gemstone Yoni, Liebelei, and Crystal Yoni Temple now contend for a share of the crystal sex toy market, addressing customers as “Beautiful Souls” and encouraging them to share their success stories online with hashtags like #MayTheOrgasmBeWithYou. Searching ‘crystal dildo’ on Etsy yields over 1,000 results. In other words, the sex toy and semi-precious stone industries are booming, and the same goes for the niche market uniting the two.
Chakrubs’ own beginnings were humble enough.
Cuccia dreamed up the company in 2011 while learning about chakras from the creator of web series Spirit Science and working at the popular sex store chain Pleasure Chest. Despite her employee discount, she found the inventory unappealing.
“I was seeking a more connected sexual experience and wanted to use self-pleasure as a method for healing my sexual shame and traumas,” she told OK Whatever.
Cuccia ran the idea of crystal sex toys by her friends and sister; they encouraged her to make prototypes. Now Chakrubs is one of the go-to companies for anyone looking to get off, aligned, or both, with some 95,000-plus Instagram followers and rhapsodic write-ups in women’s lifestyle magazines.
Credit: Cecilia Di Paolo
For $170, a curved butt plug made from black obsidian called the Rokh taps into the root chakra by way of one’s G-spot, reportedly in service of releasing negative emotions and encouraging wise decision-making. For $190, a curved white jasper dildo claiming to assist in finding closure, achieving inner peace, and resolving conflict. Quartz and rhodonite yoni eggs run $50 a piece, the latter promising to wrangle that excessive libido into tantric union. A six-inch rose quartz cock-and-balls dildo intended to “help dissolve emotional wounds and provide a circulation of divine loving energy through the entire aura” will set you back $250. It sells out regularly.
Cuccia has found a prominent fan in Jo Encarnacion, a prominent sexual wellness coach and influencer. Her Instagram is a collection of late afternoon sunlight on palm fronds and wood paneling, tarot cards and journals, celebrations of self-love and stretch marks in lingerie, and more recently, chronicles of experiencing vulnerability in the wake of divorce. She regularly partners with sex toy brands and advocates women embracing a self-pleasure practice. She’s fond of Chakrub’s Xaga wand.
“It really helps to clear out a body sensation that most people refer to as heaviness,” Encarnacion told OK Whatever.
“When you’re utilizing something like the Xaga pleasure wand, you’re helping to remove any of that energetic blockage you may have centered around sexual trauma, emotional experiences, relational wounds, all that stuff that’s typically stored right in that hip center.”
Chakrubs’ most popular product is a $160 oblong rose quartz dildo, meant for “reprogramming the heart to receive love” and “revealing the beauty in yourself to build self-confidence.”
Beyond the traditional dildos and yoni eggs, there are a few particularly adventurous offerings, including the Bruce Lee-inspired Nunchaku, a pair of obsidian dildos linked by a 16-inch chain. The company commissioned an art piece featuring the toy from Natalie Krim, an Ojai-based artist known for her sparse and wiry drawings of the female form. She’s a fan of the toy herself.
“When I first saw the Nunchaku I saw it as art. As a sculptural piece, the Nunchaku is not only interactive, but promotes pleasure and healing,” Krim wrote via email.
“I find that using the Nunchaku with my current partner to be the most physically and mentally healing. I’m at a point in my journey where in many ways I've entered my first healthy sexual relationship. That being said, I am in a space that feels grounded, safe, and loving, which naturally creates freedom to explore. When used with my partner, the Nunchaku helps aid in this newfound trust and overcoming of sexual [and] reproductive trauma.”
There’s an overwhelming emphasis on healing and self-realization across Chakrub’s marketing material. The French conception of orgasms and their afterglow as la petit mort has been rejected for spiritual enlightenment and improvement. This is no place for the Marquis de Sade’s animalistic sex and grotesque pleasures; instead the focus is on a continual healing process and the concept of pleasure as a fundamental right. Self-love trumps self-obliteration.
Glowing testimonials for Chakrubs’ products are peppered with mentions of overcoming trauma and accessing a higher self. Loyal customers believe its therapeutic properties are of the highest, most spiritual order. Encountering the crystal vibration elevates one’s own.
“Every single mineral property on earth has some sort of vibration, especially crystals and gemstones and rocks,” Encarnacion explained. “So when you’re using something that has a vibrational property, it helps to elevate the vibration within the body and the energy within the body. Not only is it connecting to the spirituality part of things, but it helps to enhance the vibration within the body and elevate that energy from within.”
Masturbation and vibration have long been bedfellows, just not like this. In fact, the boundaries of masturbation — something largely settled for members of the male sex more or less by high school — undergo a transmogrifying fluidity within Chakrubs’ female-centric worldview.
“We’ve been taught to think of masturbation as one thing – touching your genitalia or using a toy to stimulate your genitalia until you reach orgasm – but Chakrubs encourage you to create a practice that is unique to you,” Cuccia said.
To be fair, Cuccia isn’t one for sticking it in right away.
“If you are not comfortable with self-pleasure, you can warm up by displaying them as a gorgeous art or altar object or by using them as an external massage tool,” she noted.
Aspects of a niche subculture for decades, altar making and crystals have taken off on Instagram and TikTok in recent years. There’s a renewed (albeit decentralized) interest in goddess metaphysics and witchcraft among internet-savvy young women, and the feed-friendly aesthetics — moonlit skulls and flickering candles, smokey pastels, winding vines and flowing Stevie Nicks-esque capes, detailed tarot card and astrology wheel illustrations — certainly help.
Chakrubs’ own Instagram account is an amalgamation of the toys set amidst seashells, sprigs of flowers, fruit, and close-ups of legs and hands bathed in light. Social movements like Black Lives Matter are addressed through pull quotes about pleasure as resistance and infographics delineating a process of “learning and naming our erotic needs [as] integral to activism centered in pleasure.” Self-love is Chakrubs’ paramount concern through which all things are possible; masturbation becomes, presumably, indispensable from liberation.
A certified Reiki healer, Cuccia appeared on Buzzfeed web show As/Is to tune the hosts’ energies with the crystals resting on their bodies. After a week of off-camera use, the As/Is hosts turned into absolute believers.
“I honestly encourage everyone to do it and to really take time to love and appreciate your body,” gushed host Billie Lee.
Chakrubs aims to simultaneously please and align. Stimulating the clit isn’t the lone objective. Stimulating conversation — actual conversation, not dirty talk — is the goal when it comes to use during partner play, which allegedly unblocks the throat chakra by way of self-expression and articulating desires and needs.
Also on the unblock list: the root chakra, connected to sense of safety; the sacral chakra, connected to creation and desires; the solar plexus chakra, connected to willpower; and the third eye and crown chakras, connected to inner wisdom and spirituality. Cuccia is careful to sidestep one-crystal-fixes-all statements, citing the stones’ ability to focus intention and the user’s connection to Mother Nature. Or, in the words of SLUTEVER host Karley Sciortino: “These are essentially, like, you’re fucking yourself with the earth.”
Detractors, however, might suggest the earth is the one getting fucked.
The billion dollar crystal industry is extractive and overwhelmingly exploitive, lacking fair trade measures and safety oversight imposed on gold and diamond mining. There’s an undeniable human and ecological toll – child labor, collapsing mine shafts, slave wages, habitat destruction of endangered species, and the leeching of toxic mining byproducts that contaminate groundwater are par for the course.
According to a 2019 exposé in The Guardian, the U.S. Department of Labor estimates some 85,000 children work in Madagascar’s crystal mines alone. Myanmar jade mining is so mired by corruption and enmeshed in the country’s drug trade that a 2014 New York Times report compared it to African blood diamonds. Shadowy supply chains, combined with the reality that some of the poorest and most politically unstable countries sit on significant crystal deposits creates a living nightmare the industry has yet to reckon with.
Chakrubs claims it takes pains to avoid such practices. The company’s FAQ informs customers that they “source most of [the crystals] from a city in Brazil that is abundant with them” using legal and ethical labor practices. It lists environmental foundations Chakrubs donates to, and emphasizes the lifelong durability and thus sustainability of crystals as compared to silicone or plastic toys.
The company is also quick to defend against the other major issue with such toys: health and safety. Silicon is de rigueur in sex toy manufacturing because it’s totally non-porous; anything less can turn into a bacteria breeding ground. Their website says amethyst, clear quartz, and rose quartz are non-porous according to Gemological Institute of America researchers, but admits “the porosity of stones is difficult to corroborate.” In our interview, Cuccia personally advised using condoms over the toys during partnered sex.
But the detractors are nowhere to be found scrolling Chakrubs’ Instagram, itself a window into the overwhelmingly female community that has consolidated around metaphysical sexuality practices. “Do you believe in crystal healing?” reads the caption of a photo of a white jasper dildo resting in a model’s bare lap. The comments are a resounding yes.
Skepticism about semi-precious stones’ metaphysical properties, however, is nothing new. Crystal healing is considered alternative medicine, to put it nicely, or pseudoscience, to put it directly.
As early as the first century B.C.E., Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder dismissed the belief that amethyst prevented intoxication — a belief so prevalent the term ‘amethyst’ derives from the Greek words a-, meaning not, and -methos, meaning intoxicated. Somewhat more recently in 2001, the British psychologist Christopher French conducted a small study in which 80 participants were given counterfeit and regular crystals, along with information about what sensations they might experience. When participants reported similar sensations from both types, he concluded the only powers at work were those of suggestion and the placebo.
But the girls love ‘em. YouTube reviews remain practically uniform in their adulation. If it’s all an elaborate grift, it’s a relatively harmless one that gives women orgasms. And if it’s not, all the better. Either way, everybody comes.
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