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Crave Tease Review: Not Jewelry, Barely a Vibrator

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It’s hard not to smile while unboxing Crave’s latest semi-incognito sex toy, the Tease Ring. The small, textured black box bears the company’s name on the lid in silver gilt letters like a formal invitation to a ball. Inside, the ring rests on a soft pillow of felt-textured foam, and against the black background, the Tease’s gold chrome finish glints and glimmers in the light, promising a luxurious, top-shelf experience.

This is from the same company that makes the Vesper, a stylish vibrator that doubles as a bold necklace. That’s why I was excited to try this new sex toy, which goes on your finger, but unfortunately, as I learned during testing, the Tease Ring can’t live up to its promise of luxury.

A Poor Tease

The Tease invites you to imagine, selling you on its vibe as much as its vibrations. It conjures up images of flirtatious strangers in neon-soaked nightclubs, leaning in close to be heard over the thumping bass. The night is full of endless possibilities and carefree, reckless joy. No matter where the night takes you, you’ll have your Tease Ring on your finger, an intimate secret you wear openly—and maybe share.

Hand wearing a black ring with silver cylinder on top

It’s a lovely fantasy. In reality, the silicone ring popped off my finger almost as soon as I put it on, rolling away to parts unknown. Fulfilling my destiny as an audacious sexual libertine would have to wait; I was too busy reaching into the dusty underplaces of my apartment. Eventually, with the help of a broom, I managed to fish the Tease out from under my bed. It was an inauspicious start, but I was hopeful. (There are three sizes to choose from, each encompassing a few ring sizes. Small, for example, works for anyone with a ring size between 3 and 6.)

Those hopes were dashed once I started testing the Tease. It’s a product that’s constantly in conflict with itself. In its pursuit to be a piece of jewelry and a vibrator, it fails to be either. The vibrator is too small and weak to use, and the ring has all the charm of one of those Livestrong bracelets from the early 2000s.

It’s a shame because Crave’s flagship, the Vesper, succeeds in both of these roles; it’s a good vibrator and a nice necklace. I’ve even seen it out in the wild, worn as an audacious statement piece, a knowing wink between queer people in sapphic spaces.

The Worst of Both Worlds

The Tease Ring is just plain awkward to use. If you leave it sitting on top of your knuckles in use, it feels like you’re fist-bumping your partner’s genitals. Flip it around so the ring is still on your finger but the vibrator is on the palm side of your hand, and it’s a little better. But because of the vibrator’s length, you cannot move whichever finger it’s on because it acts like a finger brace and keeps the knuckles on that finger from flexing. When you’re wearing it like this, it’s hard to use on yourself because it severely limits your manual dexterity, and it’s hard to use on a partner for the same reasons.

It’s also hard to feel sexy when you’re using this toy. When I had it on the palm side of my hand, I couldn’t stop thinking about those hand buzzer things from Saturday morning cartoons. The kind a birthday clown would secretly wear and ask everyone to shake his hand only to surprise them with an unpleasant jolt. Too bad I didn’t have the top hat or the water-squirting boutonniere to complete the look.

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Ceretone Core One OTC Hearing Aids Review: Tiny and Barely Useful

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Indiegogo-backed Ceretone is yet another hearing aid company aimed at people looking for a low-cost, low-complexity way to give their hearing a boost. At $349 for a pair—or $229 for a single ear’s aid—the tiny hearing aids are designed to have only a modest impact on hearing. Fortunately, they also make an equally modest impact on the wallet.

The first thing you’ll notice about the Core One is how small the hearing aids are. I weighed them at 0.96 grams each (with a small ear tip), which makes them perhaps the smallest aids I’ve tested to date—just a hair lighter than the Sony CRE-C10. The glossy white aids slip entirely into the ear canal, with only the recovery thread sticking out a few millimeters for retrieval. Unless you closely examine your ears, they are functionally invisible.

Out of the ear, they’re not so unobtrusive. Color-coded, cone-shaped ear tips (one blue, one red) provide a somewhat garish indication of which aid goes where. Only six ear tips, a pair of each in three sizes, are included in the box—although Ceretone also sent some clear tips on the side which I found a bit more comfortable. All of Ceretone’s ear tips are considered “closed” domes, which created a moderately distorted, echolike effect in my testing. At the very least, a broader selection of ear tips, including open domes that are more appropriate for users with mild hearing loss, would help to improve audio fidelity.

Two white inear hearing aids one with a blue cushion on the left and one with a red cushion on the right

Echo aside, I found the Core One experience to be initially a little rocky, primarily owing to significant, screeching feedback whenever I touched the aids or the recovery thread in the slightest. While the amplification impact was readily apparent, the aids were hampered by this high-pitched interference. This was further exacerbated by problems getting the aids seated in my ears properly. It may not look like it at first, but there is a “right side up” to these aids, as the recovery thread is meant to angle downward out of the ear canal. I found this surprisingly hard to achieve owing in part to the small size of the aids, which resulted in me constantly having to fiddle with them.

The Core One hearing aids are not tuned to your audiogram, nor are any frequency equalization options available. Like many low-cost hearing aids, the volume boost is across the board, providing a steady but blunt amplification to all sounds in the spectrum. You’ll need the mobile app to control the aids, as there are no onboard hardware controls available (and no way to reach them anyway).

Even these controls are on the blunt side: Six volume settings and two program modes (standard and restaurant) are available in the app—and each has to be set individually for each aid. Bizarrely, there’s no indication of what the active volume or program setting is in the app. Instead, you have to tap a control button (say, “Volume up”) and listen for beeps to guess whether the audio is loud enough; three beeps mean you are either at minimum or maximum volume. The same goes for the program mode: One beep means you’re in standard mode, and two beeps mean you’re in restaurant mode. Again, visual cues that indicate the live status of these settings seem like a bare minimum to ask for, even in a budget hearing aid product.

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