Every factual claim on 1A comes from a source we can point to, and the source decides how firmly we state it. A retailer's own policy page outranks a coupon site summarizing it. A regulation's text outranks an article describing it. When we only have the summary, the page says reported rather than stating it as fact.
Source order
- The seller's own documents. Returns pages, warranty terms, shipping and billing pages, published on the retailer's or brand's own site.
- Written statements from the seller. Customer service replies published under the brand's name, for example on a marketplace listing.
- Regulatory text and standards bodies. EU regulations, US federal and state rules, and the standards they reference.
- Health organizations. Public guidance from bodies such as Planned Parenthood and the WHO.
- Independent reporting. Named writers and publications, cited as the source of the claim.
- Third-party summaries. Coupon, partner and aggregator pages. Used only to show how a policy is marketed, never as the authority on what it says.
Verified versus reported
When a figure comes from a level 1 to 3 source, we state it directly. When it comes only from levels 5 or 6, we write that it is reported and say we could not confirm it from the seller's own page. The Adam & Eve row on the sex toys online page is an example: the 30-day figure for toys is labelled as reported because the retailer's own returns page did not confirm it.
Retail policies change
Return windows, guarantee terms and shipping rates are set by retailers and change without notice. Every policy table on the site is a snapshot from the date of the last review. We re-check policy rows before each revision of a page, and we tell readers to read the policy at checkout before relying on any figure, including ours.
Material claims
We do not run laboratory tests and do not claim to. Material information comes from published standards, the properties of the materials themselves, and what makers state about their own products. Where a maker's claim cannot be checked, such as body-safe or medical-grade, we say what the claim does and does not mean rather than repeating it. The reasoning is set out on the sex toy safety page.
What we leave out
We do not publish star ratings, best-of rankings, or claims about how a specific product feels in use. Those would require hands-on testing we do not do, and we would rather leave a gap than fill it with guesses.