Toy Review – The Wave by Womanizer

It’s rare that a major “vanilla” brand partners up with folks who make sex toys, but if anyone was going to snag some mainstream mingling it would be pleasure industry giant Womanizer. Having already spearheaded the entire genre of air-pulse toys, they’ve decided the next hurdle is the household – bathrooms, specifically.

Hansgrohe are the experts behind Womanizer’s latest product The Wave, a detachable shower head built for function and – for the first time, at least deliberately – pleasure.

Backstory

I was really excited to see The Wave’s debut – you may think that’s odd as I’m not usually one for anything even hinting at gimmicky, but like so many vulva-owners, the shower head was one of my first forays into orgasms that were…device-assisted? Most people don’t classify their bathroom fixtures as sex toys, but that’s where a lot of us start out. Call it a bit of nostalgia I suppose, but the idea of a shower head specifically designed to be a sex toy really intrigued me. Even better was hearing that it was a partnership with a major brand known for quality and reliability (which it really needs to be in order to justify the price, but more on that in a moment.)

The Features

The Wave is as inconspicuous as they come, being that it is literally a perfectly functional typical shower head, there is not one single thing about it that says “I also use this to masturbate”, unless someone who also owns a lot of sex toys is inspecting your shower head so thoroughly that they recognize the Womanizer logo (unsurprisingly, Hansgrohe don’t seem too pressed that their branding is nowhere to be found. You also wont find any mention of their partnership with Womanizer on their own websites. Willingness to collaborate doesn’t always translate to elation to tell the world you’re branching into the orgasm industry, I guess.)

You can find The Wave in the standard white, black, or chrome finishes, and the adapter should fit any standard shower head hose. The Wave fit into my existing handle rest, but I’ve replaced shower heads in the past that did not fit the old system’s cradle very well, so that might be a thing to consider when purchasing. The design of the head blends nicely with the rest of my existing fixtures and I don’t think that if I’d never seen my current shower or The Wave before, I would stop and think “oh that’s a replacement part” like I would for some other designs. That might not matter to most folks, but the remodel of my bathroom was lengthy, pricey, and very particular, so I want my shit to match and look good. There are a LOT of other shower head options I would never even think of purchasing based on aesthetics alone.

The handle has a push-button to switch between the three settings – “Powder Rain” “Pleasure Jet” and “Pleasure Whirl” – and a slider to control the water pressure for each.

The Experience

The biggest question I have to ask myself about The Wave is – do I need to replace the expensive-fancy-bath-fixture-brand shower head I already have? Is The Wave so much different than any other detachable shower head out there that it justifies a swap? While most sex toys can either be a first, or an addition to the collection, your shower head is something you’re semi-permanently affixing. No one wants to bring their own favorite shower head to the bathroom with them each time they want to wash off, so whichever one you choose ought to be the best option. The Wave can’t give you a middling shower or orgasm experience and still make the cut.

I actually really like the “Powder Rain” setting more than my actual rain shower – it feels great! I prefer being able to direct my shower head so I would greatly prefer this setting over the actual fixed rain shower I have that just sprays directly down from the ceiling. My existing detachable head has a normal spray setting that is a bit more intense and the little jets are designed to cover more area, so it doesn’t really have the “rain-like” quality. The other two settings I have are a mist – which also is quite nice but just as hard to control as the vertical rain shower, and a jet. Strictly for showering purposes I’d love to have the “Powder Rain” feature on my existing shower head. Sexually speaking, the “Powder Rain” does nothing for me, but I had no expectations that it would.

The “Pleasure Jet” setting is where things should start to get interesting. As far as showering goes, this is actually the setting I used to rinse my hair out, as I didn’t feel like the “Powder Rain” had enough oomph, even with the slider all the way up (and my house has excellent water pressure.) I found it to be far less of a “jet” than any detachable shower head I’ve had in the past, the spray definitely covers a larger area, and theres no tell-tale pulsing that most “jets” use. It’s more like a garden hose jet, but still significantly weaker.

Orgasm worthy? Only just barely. Despite typically hating patterns in my clit vibes, when it comes to shower heads that pulsing is what does it for me, and The Wave doesn’t do that. I can get away with flicking a really strong steady jet back and forth over my clit, but even with my incredible water pressure, because it’s not a very concentrated stream The Wave’s jet intensity is limited (and I’d probably be out of luck in a house that had poor water pressure.) This is the part where I remind you all that I struggle to find clitoral stimulators that work for me, and what I consider passable would be someone else’s torture device (I’ve actually used a waterpik before…) so consider your own sensitivity levels when weighing my opinion here. Still, if you look at the dispersal in the photo below, I’m not sure we’d unanimously agree that this setting is a “jet” the way we’ve come to know it from other shower heads.

The “Pleasure Whirl” was the new one for me. I’ve owned and used a lot of different shower heads with lots of different settings, but none of them did this, and maybe that’s for the best…

The “Pleasure Whirl” is three small jets in a triangle, and from what I can tell they each move in a rotation that causes the three streams to …well, whirl around in a squiggly pattern. It feels like this is meant to be THE stand-out setting, since almost all detachable shower heads have a regular spray and jet spray, but unfortunately it does absolutely nothing for me. If you’re in the “direct stimulation is too intense” camp then this might be a fun thing to play with, but I’m in the “find the exact spot and don’t move” group of clit stimulators, so the fact that none of these three swirly streams ever hit the spot, much less stay on it, means nothing but frustrations for me. When I said The Wave made me feel nostalgic, I definitely wasn’t talking about all the times a clueless partner spent ten minutes rubbing the inside of my thigh like they were trying to get a stain out and then asked me if I’d cum yet, but that’s where the “Pleasure Whirl” setting brings me back to. I can aim it so that one of the streams makes contact with my clit on and off, while the other two are wiggling around on the side of my labia, or I can centre it and only have the water hinting at the idea of stimulating my clit.

Shower-wise? Not really useful. It’s not strong enough to feel like a squiggly scalp massage, and it’s not covering any more surface area or anything like that to make it more appealing than the other two settings.

I think it goes without saying that I preferred all three settings cranked to max intensity, but I can appreciate someone else’s desire to use something softer and be able to increase it as they please. Still, even with my excellent water pressure, the jet setting was still too weak for me, I had to really work for the orgasm I had with it and that’s not a very relaxing bath/shower experience, and I wonder how much other users would actually utilize the slider to turn it even further down. When the whole shtick is about the luxury of “self care” and “pampering yourself,” I really need the orgasm to come easily. I LOVE showers, I will easily spend my whole life in a good shower, I find water running over the body terribly sensuous…everything about The Wave should have been a recipe for ecstasy. And yet.

I like that the push button is easier to maneuver than my existing and most other detachable shower heads twisting to switch the settings, but I was a bit disappointed that the button got stuck a few times in just the short while I’ve used it. It easily became un-stuck, but it makes me wonder if it would hold up to long-term use, since most people don’t change out their shower heads with any sort of frequency. There doesn’t appear to be any way to take the shower head apart if you wanted to fix something inside, so the durability at this price point is a pretty big factor I think. Unfortunately I can’t put off writing this review for several more years to see if The Wave stands up to the test of time. If you’ve got a household of fidgeters that can’t resist a good clicky button to play with at bath time this may not survive long.

Should You Buy This?

There are some unique factors to consider when trying to figure out if I want to recommend The Wave to someone. First of all, do you already have a shower head that you like? I’m a big believer in “don’t fix what ain’t broke” so if you’re not actually in the market for a new shower head then no, you probably don’t need this. If you don’t have a detachable shower head, or you don’t like the one you do have, then maybe The Wave should go on your shopping list.

The next question is how is your water pressure, and is this going to matter to you? If you don’t require much strength to your clit stimulation then maybe you can get away with a weaker stream, but if you’re more like me, bad water pressure might turn this into a colossal waste of money. Unfortunately I don’t have some other home with worse pressure I can test this out in to see how much of a difference it makes – some systems are specifically designed to make up the difference, but I’m not sure if The Wave has that capability. Given that they advertise its water-saving properties as a selling point…the answer is probably not. If your water pressure sucks, then The Wave might too.

Third, what type of stimulation do you like, and does The Wave actually do it? If that hard pulsing jet is the setting you always choose (or something other than the remaining two options on The Wave – I’ve seen shower heads with over a dozen choices) then The Wave is probably not going to be a sensible swap. If you’ve never masturbated with a shower head before, or you’re not too picky about what it feels like, then The Wave could be a fun new experience.

For me personally, I prefer my existing equipment. The Wave failed to deliver something that was both unique and effective for me. I don’t need a new shower head, I already like the shower experience that my current set-up provides me, and while I rarely masturbate in the shower these days, if I want to then I have a shower head that has a function and intensity that works for me, where The Wave did not. If I did want or need to replace my shower head, my local big-box hardware store has a model with nine different settings for under a hundred bucks…I’d probably start there before turning to Womanizer for a more expensive product with fewer features.

I’m left to wonder if Womanizer actually did something with the creation of The Wave. If you take the “designed by people who do sex toys” out of the equation, then The Wave is just a regular plastic shower head with only three features and a hefty price tag – there’s nothing definingly Womanizer about it. Considering you can masturbate with any shower head, I feel like there really needed to be something special happening here that would make it “the sex toy shower head.” The “Pleasure Whirl” feature felt different but not seriously orgasmic. Overall it feels like Womanizer just contracted a bath fixture company to make them a shower head, rather than a real joint effort or meeting of the minds. The Wave just isn’t bringing enough sex toy to the table for me (and honestly it’s only barely bringing the shower head part either.) I really yearned for more here, and I definitely expected a better experience than the ones I had over a decade ago from whatever the cheapest-possible-model detachable shower head my mom put in our bathroom was. Hangrohe is supposed to offer the cutting-edge in bath fixture technology, but I’m not convinced they showed up for Womanizer, and I’m also not convinced that Womanizer showed up for Womanizer. I’ve had better showers and orgasms.

Big thanks to Womanizer for sending me The Wave to review! You can get your own by shopping Here