I Tried Out Pumpkin Spice Lube—and It's Exactly What Your Sex Life Doesn't Need

I have a confession: I don’t know when pumpkin spice latte season starts—and I don’t care. As someone who detests the taste of coffee, it’s hard to get riled up about a seasonal latte. So while the rest of the world was falling in love with pumpkin spice at Starbucks, I was sitting on the sidelines.

My first real foray into pumpkin spice didn’t come until 2017, when I was the lucky writer who tested out pumpkin spice cough drops from CVS. As a pumpkin spice virgin, I wasn’t expecting much, but they were surprisingly delicious. Before the flavors melded into cinnamon-like menthol, the first few seconds felt like I’d consumed wonderfully warm spices.

So when I got a chance to try Jo Pumpkin Spice-Flavored Personal Lube ($10; amazon), I thought, why not?

Sex lube and cough drops are miles apart, of course, so I went into this experiment a little more cautiously than I did the first. The first night, the 2 fluid ounce container of this water-based lubricant sat on my bedside table; I simply smelled it. One whiff brought back my memories to fall on campus at Syracuse University, when the leaves turned red and gold and the dining halls served autumnal goodies like pumpkin bread and apple cider donuts.

The lube didn’t smell pumpkin-y at all, but that’s a general misconception about pumpkin spice-flavored things—there isn’t actually any pumpkin in them. Instead, pumpkin spice is the mix of spices used to make pumpkin pie: cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and cloves. And the lube had plenty of that going on.

Because I’m a really great friend, I looped my best friend, Katie, into this experiment the following day. She also thought the lube smelled like donuts, but I pushed her to go a step further. “Want to taste it?” I asked, with lube already coating my fingers. Because she’s a really good friend, she did.

Her response: “All I taste is cinnamon.” I disagreed. While I could taste a bit of cinnamon, my palate was overwhelmed by artificial sweetness. As for how it feels, it was very similar to other water-based lubes—slick, but it absorbs more quickly than silicone-based lubricants. I was a little nervous that it would make my skin tingle, because it smells so much like cinnamon, but there was no tingle whatsoever.

The real action didn’t start until later that night, when my wonderful girlfriend so kindly agreed to let me slather pumpkin spice lube on her vulva while I went down on her. And this is where I knew pumpkin spice lube was going to take a huge turn from pumpkin spice cough drops. Because when you’re licking the outside of an aroused vagina, there’s a whole lot of vaginal fluid mixed in with the flavor of the lube.

If I could barely taste the cinnamon before, I couldn’t taste it at all now.

What I did taste was a sickly fake sweetness barely masking the taste of vagina. I gagged a few times and almost took my girlfriend up on her offer to wipe it off, but I kept going. The gross artificial taste wasn't so bad once I stopped focusing on it and started zeroing in on the sexy noises coming from above my head. But I definitely won’t be trying pumpkin spice lube again.

Though she didn’t actually try it, even the thought of using pumpkin spice lube was too much for Katie. She wouldn’t have issues with vaginal fluids mixing in, but even giving a pumpkin spice-flavored blow job didn’t seem appealing. “Sometimes you’re choking on a plain penis,” she says. “What if it was a cinnamon penis?”

Of course, this is just the opinion of two women who, tbh, don’t generally like using flavored lube anyway. If you do like to make vaginas or penises taste NOT like vaginas or penises when you have them in your mouth, maybe this pumpkin spice lube is exactly what you want.

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