Scared of Your First Dildo? How We Design the Small Sizes

The smallest thing we pour is 7.4 cm long, of which 5.5 cm goes anywhere, and 10 cm around at its widest. The largest is 45.5 cm long and 32.5 cm around. Those two objects were drawn separately. They are not one shape at two settings, and the reason people rarely ask about the small end is that they assume there is nothing to decide down there.

Small is not the same as gentle

A 293-upvote thread on r/dildo, from someone fed up that everything on the market seems built for somebody much larger, contains this line: "the couple small ones I've seen are super rigid, and like, those also hurt/aren't pleasant". We did not commission that sentence and we would not have phrased it as well. It names the failure mode precisely.

Our own morphology reference explains why from the other direction. At the moment a tip meets the sphincter the contact area is tiny, so pressure concentrates, and even soft silicone can read as sharp for a second. Shrink a big shape without touching anything else and you keep that first spike while deleting the length and mass that made the rest of the stroke worth having. You get something short, stiff and pointless.

So the entry sizes get treated as their own design problem. Different firmness, different profile, sometimes a different base.

A ladder is not one prototype at six settings

Strong Bow runs six sizes. The design notes on that piece say it plainly: the six were not scaled from one master. They exist so that people at different levels of experience can each get in the door. XS is 18.9 cm long with 14.5 cm usable, 13.2 cm around, 4.2 cm across at the widest point, 241 g. XXL is 45.5 cm long, 32.5 cm around, 10.35 cm across, 3645 g. That is 2.5 times the width and roughly fifteen times the weight. Nobody designs both of those with the same pencil.

Why XS landed at 4.2 cm across rather than 4.0 is not written down anywhere we can find. The size-by-size reasoning for that piece was never recorded at the time, and we are not going to reverse-engineer a reason after the fact, so: no answer available on that one.

A 189-upvote reply in a "bought my first dildo, what was i thinking" thread was simply "I would suggest getting a smaller size to start with honestly." Correct advice. The frustrating part is how many product lines make it hard to follow, because their small option is the large option photographed further away.

What the taper is actually doing

A cone is a wedge. Push it forward and it converts that forward push into sideways expansion, efficiently, which means a very small amount of effort produces a lot of stretch. Because the diameter changes continuously rather than in steps, how far you go is how wide you get. Stop early and you stopped early. There is no hidden shoulder waiting to catch you.

Our reference describes what that feels like as a ring of muscle being thinned and drawn outward evenly, from the inside, with no abrupt step anywhere in the travel. That is the whole argument for tapers as a first shape, and it is why Thick Conqueror in XS keeps turning up in beginner conversations. XS is 11.9 cm long, 10.7 cm usable, 10.8 cm around, 3.44 cm across, on a 4 cm disc base, 72 g. Single density, Standard firmness, every size in the run.

The step up to S is not subtle: 18 cm long, 17.2 cm around, 5.47 cm across, 264 g. Same silhouette, different animal.

Where the entry numbers actually land

Four pieces sit in what our internal grading calls the beginner band, 3 to 4.5 cm across. Everything here is measured the same way, and the diameter is derived from the girth measurement rather than measured directly.

Side note on that last column, because it comes up in emails. We measure girth with a tape and then divide by 3.14 to get the diameter. Nobody puts calipers on a soft object and gets a number they can defend. So the diameter reads to two decimal places and is still an approximation, and the girth figure is the one that came off a real measurement. It says the same thing on the size guide, which publishes girth and leaves the division to you. How to take those two numbers and compare them against what you already use is covered in the dildo sizes guide. Anyway.

The grading also caps insertable length at 15 cm for this band, which is why nothing in that table is long. Length is not the thing that scares people, but it is the thing that decides whether you can stop where you meant to.

Warm-up is part of the brief, and we cannot pour it

The highest-voted comment in that same first-toy thread, 246 upvotes, was about preparation rather than product: "When i first started toying, I found it easier if I came first with my vibrator before I tried penetration. LOTS of lube and using fingers first to warm up. Good luck!"

There is a physiological version of this. When the rectum is filled, an involuntary reflex relaxes the internal sphincter on its own. A shape that fills gradually enough to trigger that reflex smoothly gets taken; a shape that arrives all at once gets braced against. Geometry can set that up. Geometry cannot arrive relaxed on your behalf.

Which is why Wave Fantasy in S exists at all: 7.4 cm total, 5.5 cm usable, 10 cm around, 3.18 cm across, 48 g, Soft, with a curved flat base it can stand on. It is the smallest thing in the catalogue by a wide margin, and it is there for the session where the answer is "not today, something else". If you want the buyer-side version of this question, the shopping decisions rather than the design ones, we wrote that up separately in picking a first one.

Questions we get

Is a smaller toy automatically easier?

No. Firmness and profile matter as much as width. A short stiff object with a blunt front end can be harder to take than something longer with a gradual front. Check how the width changes along the length, not only the maximum number.

Why is the diameter given to two decimals if it is derived?

Because it comes from dividing a girth measurement by 3.14 and we publish the arithmetic rather than rounding it into a claim. Treat girth as the measured figure and diameter as the convenience conversion.

What is the smallest piece you make?

Wave Fantasy in S. 7.4 cm total length, 5.5 cm usable, 10 cm at the widest girth, 48 g, in our Soft band.

Does a first piece need a wide base?

For anything going anywhere near anal use, yes, and the base needs to be clearly wider than the widest part of the body. Thick Conqueror uses a flat disc for this. Wave Fantasy uses a curved flat bottom that also lets it stand upright on a shelf.

Do the small sizes use different silicone?

Same platinum-cured silicone throughout. What changes between sizes is the firmness band and, on some pieces, whether the body is poured in one density or two. Thick Conqueror is single density in every size. Strong Bow is dual density in every size. Hot Surge XS is single density, and only its M and L are dual.