It’s cute! It’s tiny! Even the packaging’s well-designed! It’s body-safe, discreet, and easy to travel with because it looks absolutely nothing like a sex toy and the battery’s easy to remove. It’s relatively quiet, ridiculously cheap and waterproof. It comes in colours other than pink and purple. So far, so good, right?

I received the sora-mikan colour scheme, which is the one I was hoping for as it combines two of my favourite colours – a chalky sky blue on the bottom, and a juicy tangerine upper half. The bottom half’s made from ABS plastic and the top half from elastomer, which I don’t really get the point of – both surfaces feel pretty much exactly the same and the elastomer doesn’t make a huge difference concerning softness, plus this means I can’t use oil or silicone based lubricants with it. Boo.

The mini’s easy to use; powered by one triple-a battery in the base, you twist the top half and it pops off to reveal the guts. There’s a nifty hidden button to turn it on and off with located on the side of the mini – as it’s concealed under the orange elastomer you can’t see it all, which is a feature I really like because I’m shallow, I guess. Another thing that’s important for me is that I can travel easily with it; because the mini’s battery powered I can just remove the battery and tuck it into my makeup bag, where it fits right in. It kind of looks like a cutesy perfume atomiser, actually.

Unfortunately, the mini doesn’t work for its intended purpose. Like, at all. The vibrations feel unusually strong in my hand; when I switched it on for the first time I actually jumped because they surprised me so much. All that power from a triple a battery? GOD HAS ANSWERED MY PRAYERS. Except…er, not so much, because the vibrations are so surface level that they just fizzle away to nothing as soon as I apply a hint of pressure. The mini buzzes away happily to itself but I can’t feel a thing. I was so confused by this that I thought I’d received a faulty one - surely the whole ‘deadened vibrations’ thing only happens to toys with an inch and a half of solid silicone between me and the motor? Apparently not.

I changed the battery twice, I used it underwater, hoping this would somehow give the vibrations a kick up the proverbial and force them to go deeper or diffuse or do literally anything but disappear into the ether as soon as I applied even the tiniest hint of pressure, but nothing changed. I’m fairly sure the tiny watch battery orbs that came with Tenga’s earlier Vi-Bo range were more powerful than this. At least they didn’t just dissolve. I don’t know what to do with the mini – it works okay if I use light, circular motions or gentle brushing strokes or traced over my underwear, but that is not how I get off. It’s a tool for teasing and not much else.

I’m disappointed. The mini had so much going for it! So much potential! I’m still not sure if I really believe in the concept of ‘beginners toys’, but obviously there are a lot of people out there who don’t want to or are unable to shell out upwards of £40 on a first vibrator, no matter how good the reviews are, and the mini could’ve been another, better option in a sea of mediocre bullets and flimsy pocket rockets. I was rooting for you, mini, and you let me down. At least you’re cute.

I was sent the iroha mini by the lovely people at Simply Pleasure in exchange for a review. Thanks guys! You can buy the iroha mini in all three colourways at Simply Pleasure for £16.95, and they also stock the original Iroha line, which I previously reviewed here.

The Irohas are obnoxiously adorable. Plush and palm-sized, they look like minimalist animations come to life and come in three different varieties – sakura (cherry blossom), midori (a little green thing. a leaf? a pear?), and yuki (snowman), each intended for a different purpose.

Getting the kind of stimulation I prefer out of vibrators is difficult for me; the one external vibe I’ve found so far that rivals my fingers is the We-Vibe Touch, thanks to that scoop shape it’s got going on. It’s like surround sound for my clit! I just wish it was softer because I like a shitton of pressure and pushing that scoop against my clit for twenty minutes feels great at the time, but then I wind up with bruised inner labia and that’s not fun. The Irohas, I think, seem to be aimed more at pinpoint stimulation using their respective tips, using a light touch to take full advantage of the silky soft ‘skin’.

That magical, dust repellent (it really is dust repellent – I have no idea how they did it but nothing sticks to these, Tenga delivered on that) skin is a little bit of a letdown for me and yet another reason why you should probably go to a sex toy shop to feel up the items you’re interested in before you drop cash on them.* The issue I have is that in pictures, the Irohas look like puffy marzipan sweeties and you assume – I did, anyway – that the squishiness goes far deeper than it actually does. The reality is that you can push your fingernail onto the Irohas and touch the firm plastic that lurks a few millimetres beneath. This very quickly dashed all my daydreams of literally hugging a fluffy cloud to my genitals and brought me back down to earth with a thud. Oops. They’re not as quiet as they look, either – I imagined they’d emit a soft purr at most but I have to smuggle them under the duvet to use them if anyone else is around.

With three speeds and a single (!) vibration pattern that I literally never use, the Irohas aren’t overly complex – until you get to the elaborate charging setup. Each Iroha comes in what looks like a pretty display case, which is actually the charging port. You plug this into the mains using the plug provided and wait 2 hours for it to charge, because a magnetic click-n-charge cable would just be too easy and of course everyone has the privacy required to be able to do this. The controls are located on the flat underbelly of each Iroha, and thankfully the buttons are the clicky raised kind – if they were the flat Lelo kind I don’t know if I’d ever be able to change the speed in use. It’s not waterproof, either, which…really? Really?

The vibrations the Irohas give off are nothing to turn up your nose at. Rumblier than your average clit vibe and more powerful for sure than the Lelo Mia 2, they’re more than enough for me and I use them both frequently. They’re a nice middle ground for people who don’t really know what they like, I think, and they give me warm, fuzzy orgasms. I want to roll over and take a lil nap afterwards. I prefer the shape of the Sakura over the Yuki; I can smush the squishy pincers of the Sakura around for a kind of clit-cuddle, and I use the Yuki by pressing and rolling the little head (I guess you’d call it a ‘head’ – it is a snowman) around, like a massage on a very small scale. I don’t use it internally as suggested; yes, the first three inches of the vagina might hold the most nerve endings, but inserting that small satiny sphere does absolutely fuck all for me.

I generally don’t talk much about price in my reviews, but I think that unless you’re looking for a very particular kind of stimulation (more of a brushing motion than intense pressure, maybe, preferring pinpoint to diffuse) the price is almost prohibitively high. I do admire Tenga, they rank up there with Fun Factory on my list of companies whose toys I want to collect and leave out on display like sculptures in their own right, and I understand that these are ~luxury products~, and yes, they’re body-safe and yes, they’re rechargeable, but £64.99 for an external use only vibrator that produces ever-so-slightly rumblier than average vibrations and isn’t even waterproof just doesn’t seem fair. I didn’t pay full price for either of mine; I was bought the Yuki by dream babe, who got it on Lovehoney’s deal of the day, and purchased the Sakura myself when it went on sale over christmas. If they died and they weren’t under warranty, would I buy them again? Sure! If they were on sale.

Coincidentially, the Yuki and the Midori (an adorable pastel green pear that I feel like I need – Gritty Woman has an extremely in-depth review of it here) are both on sale at Lovehoney right now, so you CAN get yourself a snowman and a pear for a fair price. I like the Irohas. They’re soft, small, easy to use and travel well – not counting the ridiculous charging/display box – and the vibrations are a comfortable middle ground rumble. I just think they might be a tiny bit overpriced, that’s all.

*if you live near one – I don’t anymore. Sad trombone.