Tenga Arte Drape is a new sex toy for people with penises. It’s a jiggly cylinder made of semi-transparent TPE polymer material, 14cm (5½”) long and 5cm (2”) wide. On one end there's an opening that can be penetrated for sexual pleasure. First released on the Japanese domestic market in late 2024 together with its sibling Tenga Arte Weave, it reached international markets just in time to be reviewed here.
Many brands that compete in the market for penis toys try to mimic heteronormative PiV intercourse, the purported be-all and end-all of sex. One can buy disembodied vulvas reproduced in intricate detail, accompanied by marketing materials in which conventionally attractive women in elaborate lace lingerie promise that any given product is as good as or even better than sex with a porn star. Tenga Arte Drape is emphatically not like that. It’s a simple, colorful toy designed to be used for pleasure on its own terms without selling you on a mainstream heteronormative narrative about what sex ought to be or what it signifies about your life. It’s not a substitute for other, presumably more “real” sex acts, but rather it stands on its own as a legitimate sexual experience. By designing and branding their products like this, Tenga addresses the social taboo around masturbation. If you were raised — like me — with sex-negative messages that masturbation is supposedly a grave sin or at least something to be ashamed of, experimenting with Tenga products can help you reevaluate your beliefs about your own sexuality and how the art of masturbation fits therein.
The Drape is very easy to use. To get started, you just apply lube and insert the erect penis. A sample packet of lube is provided.[1] The experience of masturbating with the Drape can only be described as intuitive — the soft material directly transfers any applied hand pressure and the toy weighs only 130g (4.5oz), light enough not to get in the way. It's stretchy and squishy, and I'm reasonably sure that it can accommodate a broad range of penis shapes and sizes. For some people who get to use it with a partner, it might be cool that the toy is semi-transparent and you can see what happens to the penis inside. There are two spiraling ribbons in pink and purple that freely “drape” around, as if carried by wind. The ribbons protrude on the inside, spaced roughly 1cm (1/2“) apart from each other, and they come with horizontally ribbed texture. These ribbons are the main source of sensation when the toy slides up and down the penis. Just as the touch receptors reset after processing one sensation, another ribbon slides along creating more pleasurable sensations to process. For me personally, this feels borderline too intense, but I’m not sure if I can qualify that sensation in any way outside of my subjectivity.
The stretchy material is not the most durable. Based on my experience with earlier, similar Tenga products, I expect it to last less than a year of regular use. It’s completely waterproof and can be used in a bath, where it conveniently contains any messy bodily fluids involved in masturbation. For thorough cleaning after each use, it can be flipped inside-out and washed with mild soap. I wish more penis toys had this ability to be flipped inside-out because it makes cleaning so much easier. After washing, the Drape can be put on the provided air-drying stand. The TPE material used is a bit of a lint magnet, so the toy is best stored in its clear protective case. For hygiene reasons, this product is not recommended for sharing with multiple partners.
Tenga is celebrating their 20th anniversary. With two decades of experience in this market they have a solid understanding of the design and engineering constraints they need to take into account. A good penis toy needs to strike a delicate balance of sensations for the different types of touch receptors in a penis. It needs to be as ergonomic as masturbating with a bare hand — a movement that’s intimately familiar to the users. It needs to be manufactured with hygienic and body-safe materials and be easy to clean, and of course it cannot be too expensive. Only once these unique design challenges are met will the product ultimately be successful in the market.
Tenga has been constantly iterating on product design. For many years, all their products used bold red-black-white colors. The newer product lines, such as Tenga Arte and Tenga Puffy, use soft pastel colors and less geometric, more “organic” design language. Notably, the pink and purple color scheme of Tenga Arte Drape is feminine-coded in Western culture. The Drape’s overall design is an iteration of the earlier Tenga Spinner product line, but it abandons the geometric rhythm of the Spinner.
Concave shapes are known to be inherently difficult for injection molding technology, which makes the design of this product particularly impressive because its concave shape is its raison d'être. To showcase Tenga’s prowess with molding soft TPE polymers, they mold two separate, narrow ribbons of colorful material with interesting, pleasurable texture on the inside of the Drape’s body. By releasing products like this, Tenga demonstrates that they’re years ahead of their competition.
As of this writing, Tenga Arte Drape retails for a fairly affordable €26 / $23 / £23, which places it in the lower range of the Tenga product catalog, next to product lines such as Tenga Spinner and Tenga Air-Tech. If you have a penis you like to play with, or if you have a special friend who has a penis you like to play with, you might try using Tenga products such as their newest release, Tenga Arte Drape. Human penises come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and distributions of touch receptors and there’s infinite nuance to how each person subjectively experiences sexual pleasure; therefore, for each person, a different Tenga product may be the “Goldilocks” sex toy. I am but a stranger reviewing everything-except-books on the Internet and I don’t know you or your body, so who am I to offer you a final recommendation at the end of this review? At that price point, it might be feasible for you to buy Tenga Arte Drape just to try how it feels. Maybe you’ll like it.
[1] This toy is designed to be used with water-based lube only; silicone- or oil-based lube will ruin it.