Sensation play

What is sensation play?

Sensation play is erotic play where the stimulus itself is the point: what your skin, ears, nose, and tongue take in. A feather, an ice cube, candle wax, a wheel, a blindfold. Power exchange can play a part but doesn’t have to, and pain isn’t necessarily part of it.

What sensation play looks like in practice

Sensation play usually looks like someone in a blindfold who doesn’t know what’s coming next.

You lie on your back, you see nothing, and one after another something of fur, something of metal, and something of ice moves over your forearm. In between, nothing happens for half a minute. That pause is exactly why the next thing lands harder.

That’s not rare. Jennifer Rehor put a list of 126 acts to 1,580 women from the kink community. At the top were no whip and no rope, but touching (99.62 percent) and kissing, licking, and sucking (99.56 percent). Further down: ice play 80.06 percent, candle wax 78.61 percent, feathers or fur 68.80 percent. Rehor sums it up dryly: the category “sensation play without the necessity of pain” is common among these participants.

How sensation play works

Because your skin has two different wirings, and the slow one has more to do with pleasure than with information.

Ralph Pawling, Peter Cannon, Francis McGlone, and Susannah Walker describe in PLOS ONE a separate system of nerve fibers in the hairy skin, the C-tactile afferents, which respond most strongly to slow, soft touch: exactly the movement of a caress. Their optimum lies between 1 and 10 centimeters per second. Brushing with a soft brush at 3 centimeters per second was found more pleasant than at 30, and the heart rate dropped measurably further with it.

There’s a second finding in it. At 3 centimeters per second on the forearm the zygomaticus major switched on, the muscle you smile with, and with none of the other stimuli did that happen: the body responded more positively than the participants could put into words.

So what you do with a feather or a hand doesn’t need to be more exciting. It needs to be slower.

Where the word comes from

From French, with a shift in meaning that turned out differently in Dutch than in English.

The Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands shows that sensatie was borrowed from French sensation, in 1718 “sensory perception, impression,” behind that medieval Latin sensatio from sentīre, “to perceive, to experience.” In Dutch, 1796 even gives “aangenaame sensatie” (pleasant sensation). But by 1802 it already means “commotion,” and that meaning won. Dutch ears hear the tabloid press in sensatie sooner than the skin. That’s why sensatiespel sounds odd and many people use the English term.

Why people seek out sensation play

Because it’s the only corner of BDSM where you don’t have to be good at anything.

The English-language encyclopedia entry sets sensation play against the mental forms of erotic play like power exchange and role-play: it speaks to the senses rather than to the relationship. That same entry describes the word as an umbrella, with pain play on one side and general sensation play on the other, and quotes Celina Criss: pain never has to come into it.

• For the one on the receiving end, sensation play means there’s nothing to perform. You lie there, you feel, and there’s no role you have to play well.
• For the one doing it, the reward is in attention: every stimulus answers within a second, in a breath or in a shoulder that drops.
• For a couple, the return is that you can try something without a power dynamic attached to it right away. There’s not much a feather can break.

That it can be light doesn’t mean it stays light. That same umbrella spans candle wax, clamps, and whip, and the encyclopedia adds that for the heavier forms consent and safety still fully apply.

How people do sensation play

Almost always in the same order: first the sight goes, then one material at a time, then alternate.

1. Contrast in texture. Fur, silk, a rough brush, a bare hand. Two things far apart do more than five that resemble each other.
2. Contrast in temperature. Ice cubes and candle wax, or peppermint oil, which feels cold without being cold.
3. Contrast in sharpness. A pinwheel or sandpaper next to a flat hand.
4. Contrast in absence. Silences, and a blindfold that wakes up the rest of the body.

The difference between careful and sloppy isn’t in the tools, but in two habits: first trying out on a forearm what’s going to happen on a more sensitive spot, and never pushing anything through just because it looks good.

Misconceptions about sensation play

“Sensation play is another word for pain play.” The other way around. Pain play is one branch; the encyclopedia explicitly names the soft one too, and in Rehor’s data touching and kissing score highest of all.

“Harder is more intense.” Not in the one part that has been measured: in Pawling and colleagues’ study slow stroking scored higher than fast, on both the rating and the heart rate.

“Without pain it isn’t BDSM.” The line is at consent and intent, not at intensity. Half an hour in which someone else decides what happens on your skin while you see nothing is a scene.

What I see myself

I am Victor, a gigolo, twenty-five years active in BDSM and trained as a psychotherapist. Sensation play is what I most often start with when someone doesn’t yet know whether BDSM is for her. No tactic, just ease: it takes no prior knowledge.

Afterward women often come back to the least spectacular moment. Not the candle wax, but the twenty seconds before it when nothing happened. And the mistake I see most is too many tools: whoever lays out six things uses all six of them too.

What you can do yourself

• Pick two materials, not six. One soft and one rough is enough for half an hour.
• Move slowly, about three centimeters per second: a caress along your forearm then takes a good five counts.
• Test everything on a forearm first before it goes to a more sensitive spot, ice and candle wax included.
• Build in silences of ten to thirty seconds. The contrast does the work, not the stimulus.
• Put the blindfold on sooner than you think, and agree on how you say “stop.” The safeword page covers why a word works better there than a gesture.
• Switch to something soft as soon as the skin stays red instead of pulling away.

More on sensation play

On this site the separate parts are explained on their own: candle wax, ice cubes, abrasion, and the pinwheel. The article on sharp and dull pain explains how those two kinds of stimulus differ, and skin hunger what touch does when it has been missing for a long time.

Beyond this site, the article by Pawling and colleagues is free to read and the most concrete on why speed matters; Jennifer Rehor gives the only large count of what women in this corner actually do.

Where this fits on this site

If you want to know how this feels without having to figure out first what’s possible, an evening with a few agreed stimuli is the smallest step. The page about the BDSM date covers how that gets discussed beforehand.

Sources

• Sensual, Erotic, and Sexual Behaviors of Women from the “Kink” Community. Jennifer Eve Rehor, Archives of Sexual Behavior 44(4), 825–836, 2015. Questionnaire study of 1,580 women from the kink community about 126 acts. Gives, from table 10, the participation rates in any form for touching (99.62), kissing/licking/sucking (99.56), ice play (80.06), candle wax (78.61), and feathers or fur (68.80), and the finding that “sensation play without the necessity of pain” is a common phenomenon among these participants.
• C-tactile afferent stimulating touch carries a positive affective value. Ralph Pawling, Peter R. Cannon, Francis P. McGlone & Susannah C. Walker, PLOS ONE 12(3), e0173457, 2017 (author names and source checked via Crossref). Gives the optimum of the C-tactile afferents at 1 to 10 centimeters per second, the higher pleasure rating and the stronger heart-rate drop at 3 versus 30 centimeters per second, the activation of the zygomaticus major only at 3 centimeters per second on the forearm, and the note that patients with only intact C-fibers describe the sensation itself as vague.
• sensatie. Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands (Philippa, Debrabandere, Quak, Schoonheim & Van der Sijs, 2003–2009) via Etymologiebank. Gives the borrowing from French sensation “sensory perception, impression” (1718) and earlier sensacion (1370), the origin in medieval Latin sensatio from sentīre “to perceive, to experience,” and the Dutch datings: “strong impression” 1787, “aangenaame sensatie” 1796, and “commotion” 1802.
• Sensation play. Wikipedia. Gives the description as an umbrella term with pain play and general sensation play as subtypes, the distinction from mental forms of erotic play like power exchange and role-play, the list of common tools, and the quote from Celina Criss that pain never has to come into it. This entry leans for those statements on magazine journalism rather than research; it is used here only for terminology and scope, not for a figure or a safety statement.

Related terms

• BDSM. The broader framework sensation play is one of the branches of.
• Impact play. The neighboring category where the blow is central rather than the stimulus.
• Abrasion. Rubbing over the skin, the rough side of this family.
• Candle wax. The warm side, with the melting points that make the difference.
• Ice cubes. The cold side, and why the clock matters there.
• Peppermint oil. Cold that isn’t cold, and the longest afterglow of them all.
• Pinwheel. The wheel that feels sharp without opening the skin.
• Tickling. The lightest form, and the only one where laughing doesn’t mean it’s fun.
• Hair-pulling. Stimulus through the scalp, hanging between this category and impact play.
• Blindfold. The tool almost every sensation-play session starts with.
• Sensory deprivation. The side of this family that takes away instead of adding.
• Primal play. The same stimuli, but instinctive instead of measured out.
• Zipper. The sharpest form of shear force on the skin, and the best example of what goes wrong with too much enthusiasm.
• Temperature play. The branch of this family where the stimulus is a temperature difference.
• Chemical play. The branch where a substance mimics the temperature signal without anything actually getting warm or cold.
• Pain play. The neighboring category where the stimulus does carry through to pain.