The ability to use our whole bodies for sexual pleasure is amazing. Our five senses can be stimulated to turn us on with various techniques and toys. This is called “Sensation Play” and has its origins in BDSM. You can use sensation play to add some extra fun to your sexual play or as sexy foreplay. Sensation plays uses the sense of touch mostly but also can use sight, sound, taste, and smell. Sight is the one sense that is usually deprived to heighten the other senses. You can do as little or as much as you like as long as you communicate beforehand and agree to boundaries. There are some great toys out there to help with your sensory play along with some things you can find around the house. Finding the sensation that triggers arousal and pleasure in your partner can be quite fun.
Sight
A great way to start with sensation play is to remove or limiting the ability to see. This will heighten the other senses and will also engage your partner’s perception of what’s happening in a different way. Hearing, smelling, tasting, or feeling something when you can’t see it can alter your experience in an exciting way. You can just dim the lights or shut them off all together. Add a little tactile sensation play to minimizing or eliminating sight by using a blindfold. A blindfold made out of something soft and sensuous or even out of something more hard and cold can put your partner in the right mood. Try a sash, scarf or traditional blindfold. You can also use a hood made of soft fabric or tight binding latex. If you want to try something different you can add light with mood lighting, flashing lights, or a bright light. Some play can include glasses with distorted lenses. Your choice depends on the desired effect and the level of experience and comfort (or discomfort) you are willing to participate in.
Sound
Sound, just like sight, can be effective when either adding it or subtracting it. Sight depravation while using sound can be amazing. You can also use sound before engaging in touch. Once blindfolded you can slap a belt together to make loud smacking sounds, run a metal chain along something to get that rattling sound, whisper or talk dirty while the person can’t see/touch you or use music that sets the mood. Simply hearing footsteps or tapping sounds can activate the imagination. If you’re using a paddle or flogger you can slap it against something before using or it, or not even use it at all but give the suggestion that you might. Even the sound of a vibrator can be quite arousing before it ever even touches. Sound depravation can be exciting too. Not being able to hear where their partner is but only feel, smell, and taste can be a mind-altering sensation and will also make it hard to guess what’s going to happen next. That can be highly erotic. Another way to eliminate sound is to use a gag. Anything from a simple sash to a ball gag is available. Make sure to have some sort of non-verbal signal with your partner when using a gag.
Smell
Smell may be a surprising form of sensation play but when you consider how your sense of smell can trigger memories, it can also trigger arousal. It could be the smell of leather or latex that make you aware of your nearby partner and what awaits you. The smell of the leather or suede flogger or a leather crop, even metal has a distinct smell. The smell of food can be sexy too. Have your partner smell strawberries before feeding them, or deny them depending on how you want to play. Incense, candles, and massage oil all have some delicious scents that can add to your partner’s experience. Even bitter smells like sweat or ozone from electro-stim toys can stimulate in a positive way.
Taste
Taste, like smell, triggers the brain in different ways. The taste of food can be sweet like honey, fruit, or candy. It can be bitter/sour like wine, lemons, or even the taste of a leather crop held in the mouth. It can add just enough sensation to arouse. Taste is pretty straight forward so there’s not much to add here other than finding out if your partner has a particular taste they find sensual or if a domination/topping situation is occurring, what tastes will turn them on from a submissive/bottom point of view. The key here is the actual taste or texture of what you are giving someone, as just the act of feeding or denying food is not sensation play. It’s about the affect the taste has on them.
Touch
Touch is quite powerful. It can be soft, it can be rough, it can tickle, or it can hurt. It can be cold or hot, or both! Combined with the other sensations it can take your partner over the edge before you’ve even touched their genitals much less engaged in penetrative sex. There are a wider variety of sensation play toys that engage with touch alone. A feather tickler can be stroked gently on the skin or used to tickle around the body. You can tickle with a scarf, the ends of a flogger, the soft touch of a crop or even your fingertips. Vampire gloves have small metal teeth embedded in the fingers and palms. Those can be used with a soft stroking hand or a biting grip. A Wartenburg wheel can find it’s small sharp spikes feel tickly or painful depending on the pressure applied. Sparks from electro stim are also considered sensory play especially when you’re blindfolded and don’t know where the arc will touch next. The use of nipple clamps not only works for pain play but also will make nipples more sensitive to touch and temperature. Using cold objects like ice or a glass/metal dildo soaked in cold water can be quite stimulating as is heat with dripping wax or that same glass/metal dildo soaked in warm water.
Sensation Play; an Alternative or Additive
While pain is a sensation; flogging, spanking, caning, and whipping are not considered sensation play. Sensation play is more tantalizing and temptation. Manipulating the senses in a gentler or teasing way. It can lead up to it as the smell of suede and the tickle of flogger tips before a flogging but they are not the same thing. Sensation play is usually done in combination, a mix and match of techniques. Often it is used in conjunction with restraints but it’s not necessary. Just being a willing participant to being blindfolded, or touched, offered something sexy to eat or adding a sexy scent is all part of sensation play. It can rev up engines before sex and/or added during so penetrative sex is heightened. One can even use sensation in solo play. Using heat or cold with your fave masturbation toy or even using a feather or wax on yourself can be very hot. Find the right combination of sensation play toys techniques for some sensational sexy time.
By: Technogeisha
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