Why we publish specifications

Why we publish specifications

Shopping in this category has a particular texture. Every product is premium. Every material is body-safe. Everything is whisper quiet and powerful at the same time, and after four or five listings you realise you have read a great deal and learned nothing you could use to choose between them.

The problem is not that the writing is bad. The problem is that it is not falsifiable. "Whisper quiet" cannot be wrong. It also cannot be checked, compared, or held against the product when it arrives.

Falsifiable beats reassuring

A number can be wrong. That is the entire point of publishing one.

"42 dB, measured at the lowest continuous setting" is a claim that could turn out to be false. If it is, you would find out, and you would be right to hold it against us. "Whisper quiet" carries no such exposure — it is a mood, and moods do not survive contact with a product page from a competitor claiming the same mood.

The same holds for materials. "Body-safe silicone" is a phrase with no controlled definition in this category; any seller can apply it to any material, and many do. "Platinum-cure silicone, supplier declaration on file" names a process and points at a document. One of these tells you something. The other tells you that someone wanted you to feel reassured. We wrote more about how to read these terms in silicone grades, explained.

Blank fields

Our product pages have empty fields on them. This is deliberate, and it is the part of this approach we most often get asked about.

If we have not measured a product's noise level under stated conditions, the noise field is empty. Not "quiet." Not "very low." Empty.

An empty field is information. It says: we do not have this number, and we are not going to substitute a word that sounds like one. You now know exactly as much as we do, which is the correct amount for you to know.

An adjective in that same space would be worse than the blank in a specific way — it would look like a specification while carrying none of the obligations of one. The blank at least does not pretend.

We would rather a page look incomplete than look complete and not be.

Where the specifications come from

Some figures come from the manufacturer. Some we have measured. Some we have not obtained.

The distinction matters, so we try to keep it visible. A manufacturer-stated runtime and an independently measured one are different kinds of claim, and blending them into a single confident table would erase exactly the distinction a careful reader is looking for.

Where a supplier declaration exists for a material, we reference it. Where it does not, we say the material without dressing it up. Where we have measured something ourselves, we state the conditions — because a decibel figure without a distance and an intensity setting is not comparable to anything, and we have written about why in how to read a noise specification.

What this costs

It costs conversions, at least in the short run. A page with three empty fields converts worse than a page confidently asserting excellence in all three. We are aware of the arithmetic.

The trade we are making is that a purchase made on an accurate page is a better purchase. Someone who buys a device knowing its lowest setting is firm, because we said so, does not return it in disappointment. Someone who buys it because the page said "gentle yet powerful" quite reasonably does.

There is a longer-run version of the same argument, which is that a page you can trust on the unflattering details is a page you can trust on the rest. That is not a claim we can prove to you in advance. It is only demonstrable over time, by being unflattering when the facts are.

What we are not claiming

We are not claiming our products are the best available. We do not know that, and any brand asserting it about its own catalogue is doing the thing this note is about.

We are not claiming our specifications are complete. They are visibly not — that is what the blanks are.

We are not claiming this approach is unusual because we are unusually virtuous. It is a straightforward response to a category where the standard product page has drifted so far into persuasion that a plain material name reads as a differentiator. It should not be one. It is a low bar and we would prefer more people cleared it.

What you can do with it

The useful version of all this is a habit, and it transfers to any listing anywhere, including ours.

When you read a product page, sort what it tells you into two piles. Things that could be false — a named material, a measured figure, a stated dimension, a rating with a standard behind it. And things that could not — premium, luxurious, body-safe, whisper quiet, skin-friendly.

Then judge the page by the size of the first pile.

Most of the objects in this category are bought once and kept for years. That is worth a few minutes of reading the specification rather than the adjectives.

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Our product pages state measured figures with their conditions, name materials without embellishment, and leave fields blank where we do not have the data.