Coco de Mer Brown Leather Riding Crop

Something Missing

There’s always excitement when you are selected to test a product for Lovehoney. This goes double for one that would usually be beyond your budget. This excitement is enough to leave you humbled and to perhaps be tempted to overlook flaws or downplay them, as well as look past the cost and not consider that in the review. I will try and avoid doing that in this review because, despite the Coco De Mer Brown Leather Riding Crop being a solid product ,there is something... missing. A culmination of small faults and a lack of ‘wow’ factor left me questioning if it’s really worth spending £120 on this crop. Hindsight may be 20:20, but with it I can say that I would probably invest elsewhere. It arrives in pretty standard packaging, by which I mean nothing of note, but the storage bag. It’s a lovely calico bag that actually fits the product it’s supposed to store inside (laugh away, but that has been an issue in the past with some testers) and looks to be quality and durable. It has a really nice ‘not soft but not quite rough’ feeling to it that frankly (given what it is supposed to store) I find ironic and hilarious. The crop itself has a lovely silhouette and a balanced weight, is incredibly easy to use and pleasant to wield. I love the little Coco De Mer logo embossed on the tip of the toy. The handle has two raised bits marking the ends of the handle. I like this feature partly because it balances the toy’s look, and partly because it makes a slip of the hand all the less likely than before. Small details in the design like this are usually what take a toy from good in use to great. In use, the hitty part delivers stinging blows that took my breath away. The sound of the slaps is beyond compare, the feeling even more so. It’s a combination of stinging and thudding and incredibly satisfying, whichever end of the crop you’re on. I cannot fault anything about how well the toy handles itself- on that front, it is flawless. The aesthetics, however... they’re a bit off. The braided design of the leather thongs on the crops body have a raggedy edge and a few of the visible stitches at the head of the toy were threadbare and loose before I even took it out of the bag. Normally I would be willing to overlook small details like this, but if you’re going to be paying a small fortune for a crop I believe you should know of these faults. If you like being hit and have money to burn this will be an excellent toy for you, but be aware that you might be slightly let down if you expect stellar quality for the price. This lack of care around some of the small details is a huge disappointment. Without those tiny issues I would have unreservedly had to write a glowing five star review. Instead, this piece of writing is doomed to imperfection - much like the crop itself.

Great while it lasted

This is a beautiful riding crop. The braiding all the way down. The real leather, with the chocolate colour providing a touch of class that is often missing from BDSM toys. I loved this riding crop. In addition to its lovely aesthetic, it also provided a good amount of pain, more of the stinging variety. Sadly, it broke during a session of play after having it for only a little over a year. The leather end just came right off. At the time it cost me over $150, so I expect a toy that expensive to be able to withstand several years of use (and to be clear, it's not as if I was using this on a nightly or even weekly basis). I wish I could give this a five-star review, but with quality like that I just can't.