The B9 Cock Ring is part of a range of silicone cock rings that themselves form part of the wider Ovo range of sex toys. Ovo are new to the market, having launched last year amid much fanfare. The company showed a bewildering array of designs at the Hanover eroFame show though at the time virtually none of the products was functional. Now supplies are hitting the market so as you can imagine I was eager to see if all the fuss about the Ovo brand’s launch was justified.

What can’t be denied about the Ovo brand is that it looks contemporary. The packaging is white with silver lettering, clean and simple. The cock rings are displayed under clear plastic on the white backing cards making them practical for retailers to display and attractive for browsers in high street sex shops. Whether you’re buying online or at a physical store the toys themselves look the part too with a variety, a large variety  of designs that are attractive, simply and unfussy.

I was impressed so far – but then I opened the packaging.

Reading the instructions was a joke, they are printed in a dark grey on white paper meaning the contrast is not good in low light. The font size used is so small as to be unreadable. I could just read the section titles of the instructions and guarantee with my reading glasses but needed a magnifying glass to pick out the rest of the test. When I did the instructions turned out to be generic across the Ovo range of products giving only information on the materials used to construct the toys and batteries used. In the case of the batteries Ovo simply provide a list of the batteries used in their range of designs and don’t tell you which fits which. So it’s fortunate that the B9 cock ring comes fitted with the required 2 R11/L736 cells.

The size of these batteries worries me as I can see them running out quickly and many people keep a stock of these around the place.

The instructions contain no information about the number of functions for the cock ring or any of the other toys. In fact the B9 cock ring just has one speed from the tiny bullet embedded in it. There is so little information in the densely packet, multi-lingual instruction book that you wonder how they wrote so much but said so little. OK there are care and storage instructions but brevity would have allowed a larger text that was readable by the naked eye. One thing I did glean from the instructions is that the cock rings are shower proof, so good for shower fun but not for immersion in the bath.

This cock ring has a 15 year warranty though I can’t see anyone bothering Ovo with warranty claims 15 years in the future so I wouldn’t count that as a guarantee of longevity. The Terms and conditions are pretty standard and only cover defective materials and manufacturing faults. Easy for a manufacturer to wriggle out of.

Sadly much as I’d like to say that this cock ring is great during sex I can’t because the internal diameter is too small to be comfortable on my erect penis. The B9 Cock Ring is so small that it easily passes through the opening of my favourite cock ring, the Laid P3. I admit the silicone used in the Ovo B9 Cock Ring is very soft and stretchy but it takes four fingers to pull it open enough to insert my erect penis and when in place left my veins bulging uncomfortably.

The vibrations are of too high a frequency for me to find them pleasurable and as there is only one speed with no patterns this aspect of the cock ring simply doesn’t impress.

You can find these cock rings retailing for between $12 and $17 dollars on the Internet and maybe that’s where the problem lies. Price. Manufacturing down to a price means that although they are constructed from body-safe silicone the power of the bullet and number of functions are compromised to say nothing of the unreadable instructions.

I wanted to be wowed but in the end I have to sum this up as a beautifully presented product that is average in its performance and just too small for me to try out properly. I was sent a number Ovo cock rings – B2, B5, B7, B9, B10 and B11 – seem to suffer from the same issues listed above.

While I’m sure many people will find them useful, especially as they are made from body-safe silicone I can’t say that I’m yet a fan of this new brand.