For a few months in the late ’90s, women all over the US went to their local sex shops — many for the very first time — for the express purpose of buying a single item. It was a vibrator called the Rabbit by Vibratex, a company that at the time was wholly unaware of its sudden popularity.

The reason? An episode of Sex and the City in which Charlotte, the most old-fashioned and conservative of the show’s four protagonists, becomes absolutely obsessed with one. “I thought it would be all scary and weird, but it isn’t!” she exclaims upon seeing the vibrator for the first time. “It’s pink — for girls!”

That episode played a huge part in bringing vibrators into the mainstream, and in the two decades since, they’ve become just another item in people’s nightstands: not necessarily indicative of someone who’s particularly lonely, or particularly kinky.

But there’s a shift happening right now that’s similar to the watershed episode of Sex and the City, and it’s not because we’re seeing sex toys on TV. It’s because we’re seeing them on Instagram.

We now have “the Everlane of vibrators” (Maude), “the Glossier of vibrators” (Dame), and the vibrators that are actually minimalist necklaces (Crave, Unbound), all of which have adopted the sort of Instagram aesthetic that could exist within any women-focused wellness or beauty brand: cheeky feminist phrases on pastel backgrounds, sad girl meme collages, artsy photos of stomach rolls, and, of course, disembodied hands — except instead of holding a turmeric latte or eyebrow gel, they’re holding a vibrator.

This has caused a few complications for sex tech brands that use it for marketing, and for Instagram itself, which is still squeamish about sex stuff on its app (more on that later), but there’s also the other implied question: Why do we need our vibrators — objects that presumably a small number of people will ever see — to be optimized for Instagram?

The answer is more complicated than simply, “Everything is minimalist now” (though this is true, and you can blame the Great Recession). It’s also because when vibrators look like everything else — beauty tools, kitchen goods, vases, and other amorphous blobjects — then buying them doesn’t have to feel like buying, as vibrators are arguably most well-known, a thing you use to give yourself an orgasm.

“More often people come in and they’ll show us their phone and say, ‘Do you have this?’” says Lisa Finn, a brand manager at the sex toy chain Babeland. “It takes away some of the pressure, especially for folks who have never been to a sex toy shop before.”

For those who don’t immediately feel at home in sex stores, an Insta-friendly aesthetic and a photo to show a salesperson offers the same crutch that the Rabbit episode of Sex and the City did — vibrators exist within a socially acceptable space, like on social media or a wildly popular television show, so vibrators must be normal too. “Instagram is something that everybody uses,” Finn says. “If you go on a sex toy shop website, you’re putting yourself into that space, but being on Instagram is something really casual.”

Finn says a similar phenomenon occurred after a Broad City episode in which Abbi is asked to peg her neighbor Jeremy. “After that scene came out, we had so many couples coming into the store being like, ‘Hey, we’re interested in pegging,’” she says. “And you know that episode wasn’t the only time they’d thought about it. It wasn’t like, ‘I saw this on TV, let’s do it.’ It was, ‘I saw this on TV, now I can talk about it.’”

A TV show or an Instagram can get people into stores who otherwise wouldn’t be looking at all. But for sex toy makers, minimalism itself can also be a marketing tool. The brand Maude, which sells condoms, lube, candles, and a simple white vibrator, bills itself as offering a non-gendered, “human” approach to sex. Its website and Instagram are swathed in earthy neutrals — ironically, a far cry from the sparkly pink design of the Rabbit that ultimately convinced Charlotte that vibrators were not, in fact, terrifying. These days, it seems, the opposite tactic is working.

Maude co-founder Éva Goicochea says she learned how to talk frankly to customers from her time at the clothing brand Everlane, known for its simple, environmentally conscious basics. “In this industry, people conflate [selling] sex products [with] telling you what your sex life should look like,” she says. “We can’t tell you what your sex life should look like. That’s not our business. Our business is to make great products that work,” hence the pared-back, barely-there aesthetic.

Maude’s brand emphatically isn’t about girl-power catchphrases, nor does it adopt the enthusiastic “omg yay sex!” approach of many specifically women-focused sex toy brands. And after launching last year, Maude is on track to do about $1 million in sales between April 2018 and April 2019, and is currently seeing 30 percent month-over-month growth.

Minimalist sex toys, however, are not new — bullet- or rocket-shaped vibrators have existed since the 1940s, and smooth silicone vibrators similar to the one by Maude have been in sex shops since the late ’90s. Carol Quinn, the staff sexologist at Good Vibrations and curator of the Antique Vibrator Museum, says the difference is that many of them now “look more like a piece of mochi than a penis.”

Some of the buzziest (apologies) of these mochi-looking vibrators are from Dame Products, namely the Eva, which is shaped a bit like an austere cartoon frog. When it launched in a video on the crowdfunding site Indiegogo in 2014, the campaign ultimately raised 17 times more money than it initially asked for, ending up with a total of nearly $575,000. Designed by the MIT-educated mechanical engineer Janet Lieberman, the Eva was the first device of its kind that allowed someone to wear a vibrator during intercourse without having to hold it in place with their hand.

Dame, which like Maude is a direct-to-consumer company launched by two young women, is precisely the kind of brand you’d expect to see advertised on the New York City subway, which often features ads by lifestyle startups like Everlane, Quip, and Casper. And for a while, it was supposed to be.

Alexandra Fine, the CEO and co-founder of Dame, had worked with the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) on an ad campaign for more than six months before it abruptly pulled the plug. “The MTA legit ghosted me — like, mean-girl pretended they didn’t know me after communicating with me for six months and approving a campaign,” she says. Due to a change in policy that was enacted during that time, the MTA banned advertisements for “sexually oriented businesses” (it does, however, still display raunchy ads for breast implants and erectile dysfunction pills).

Dame

It isn’t dissimilar to the controversy at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in which a women-focused sex toy company called Lora DiCarlo won an Innovation Award before CES suddenly revoked it. “The biggest challenge we have to face now is the taboo of sex itself,” Fine says. “Social media platforms refuse to sell us ads, [and] loans have been denied due to the inherently prurient nature of my business, and leases ungranted.”

Even Instagram, which for many has become a kind of softcore alternative to porn, has been known to take down certain photos featuring sex toys or refuse to sell ads or sponsored posts to companies that make them. “We can’t put a picture of a realistic dildo on Instagram because it’ll get blocked in two seconds,” says Finn of Babeland. A smooth, minimalist silicone shape like a design by Maude or Eva helps, but in many cases, the devices are still considered too explicit for promotion on social media.

Society’s taboo against sex, and specifically queer and female pleasure, is precisely what sex tech companies like Maude and Dame are fighting against. But in order to do so successfully, they’ve had to seem a lot less sexy — specifically, by calling themselves “wellness” brands. “We’re seeing a move away from sexual fulfillment and health as an overly eroticized tone [and] sex is being positioned as part of a 360 makeup of being a healthy person,” Lucie Greene, the worldwide director of the trend forecasting agency JWT Innovation, told Refinery29.

Fine of Dame Products says the company’s approach to marketing has shifted from the early days, when the aim was to be frank about the fact that it was selling sex toys. “Now I’m even more willing to be indirect,” she says. “If calling them ‘tools for wellness’ helps us get more hits off Facebook, well, then, let me tell you about this cool new massager I’ve made.”

Toy brands aren’t the only sex tech companies adopting the sanitized language of wellness and beauty brands. When Dipsea, a San Francisco-based erotic audio app, launched late last year, its founders positioned it as a wellness brand, settling on a minimalist, millennial woman–friendly aesthetic that looks essentially the opposite of actual porn.

A similar phenomenon is happening to sex toys: By making them look like anything else we’d buy to make us more “well,” vibrators, and female sexual pleasure writ large, become more “normal” than ever. But unlike a candle, which might smell good for a little while but probably won’t have a lasting effect on one’s overall health or happiness, at least a vibrator can promise a gratifying result.