Did you know that apparently Gen Z is obsessed with pickles? Reminds me of the era when my own generation, millennials, were disproportionately enamored with bacon, spawning countless bacon-centric memes and jokes. Cultural trends can be so strange!
To be honest, I understand the passion for pickles even more than I understood the bacon fixation. I love me a salty snack, and few things are saltier than pickles. For years, my go-to cocktail has been a dirty martini, and while it’s normally dirtied up with olive brine, I’ve come to appreciate pickle-brine martinis just as much, if not more. The dill flavor lends an herbal savoriness that makes my little Polish-Jewish heart sing! (My fave pickles are by Grillo’s, incase you were wondering…)
All this to say, when I recently received a press release from lubricant company LubeLife about their newest launch – a limited-edition PICKLE-FLAVORED LUBE – I shrieked at my laptop and hit ‘reply’ so fast I practically pulled a muscle. (…the pain of which incidentally could’ve been alleviated by eating pickles. What can’t they do?!)
A pickle-themed press mailer
About a week later, a package arrived for me. Inside was a pickle-shaped stress ball, a pickle-shaped pen, a pickle-shaped vibrator(!), some pickle stickers (which sounds like slang for tools you’d use in a CBT scene…), green socks that say “big pickle energy,” a green pickle-emblazoned baseball cap that says “not my first pickle,” and la pièce de résistance: the pickle-flavored lube itself.
I jammed the jaunty hat onto my head immediately, and brought the lube to my wife so we both could taste it.
What’s it taste like?
As soon as my wife and I both sampled the lube, we looked at each other wide-eyed, like, “Oh damn! That’s better than I expected!” I thought it was pretty good, but my wife (admittedly not usually a flavored lube enjoyer) announced that it was probably the best flavored lube she’d ever tried.
Let me be clear: You will not like this lube if you don’t like dill pickles. I mean, duh. But I’m telling you, you really won’t. This lube is only for connoisseurs of these particular savory flavors. It doesn’t just taste salty; it actually tastes like dill – both the sweeter and savorier aspects of that flavor profile – as well as some of the other ingredients often found in dill pickle brine, such as garlic. If I were a lube sommelier with terrifically tuned-in tastebuds, perhaps I could pick out some subtler flavors therein – mustard seed, coriander, black peppercorns? – but my palate is more plebeian than that, so mostly I just taste dill and garlic.
Ultimately, the garlic note made it hard for me to love this lube beyond that initial taste-test. The same way it does in culinary applications, that taste tends to linger longer than lots of others, including the dill-y sweetness that initially seems like the lube’s main flavor. I don’t love walking around with a mouth tasting like garlic, especially if I’m gonna be making out/having sex, but I know some people who adore garlic and would probably dig this!
The martini test
My wife and I are big cocktail fans, and (as I mentioned up top) one of my favorites is a dirty martini. I’ve made myself dozens of pickle-brine dirty martinis at home over the last few years, and really enjoy the way gin and vermouth balance out the saltiness of the brine – so I thought, why not try LubeLife’s pickle lube in a martini, instead of traditional brine?
My wife suggested I make a tiny, scaled-down drink, since she (wisely) didn’t want me to waste too much good liquor on what might turn out to be a disgusting experiment… so I mixed a quarter-size martini: half an ounce of London dry gin, a quarter-ounce of Dolin dry vermouth, and a couple little squirts of pickle lube. I stirred ’em with an ice cube for chill and dilution (or dill-ution, if you will…), and then strained the mixture into a teensy little cocktail glass and brought it to my wife for tasting.
“I’m not mad at it,” she said with a shrug when she tried it. We agreed that the lube’s otherwise sharp flavor profile is pleasantly rounded out in the context of a martini – the dill and garlic were definitely still perceptible, but were significantly toned down, a fun embellishment rather than the dominant flavor. Perhaps that’s how this lube tastes best: diluted, whether by booze or bodily fluids. Speaking of which…
The sex test + a word of warning
Quite reasonably, neither of my partners were willing to let me test out this lube on their actual junk, because flavored lubes are somewhat risky from a genital health perspective. This pickle lube contains sucralose, an artificial sweetener, as well as glycerin, both of which can irritate the vagina. As such, I’d recommend only using flavored lubes externally (i.e. on/around a clit, labia, dick, balls, or anal opening), and switching to a more standard lube formula if you want to do some penetration. (My favorite, as ever, is Sutil Rich.)
That being said, a savory lube like this one is probably a better pairing with genital tastes than many other flavored lubes would be. As my friend Billy Lore often says, “Strawberry lube on a dick isn’t just gonna taste like strawberries, it’s gonna taste like strawberries and dick” – and with that being the case, it makes sense to choose a lube that will pair harmoniously with the taste of dick and/or pussy, rather than clashing with it. I tried some of this lube alongside a dash of my own vaginal fluids, and found that the two worked well together, like prosecco and oysters – they were vaguely in the same flavor family and thus actually elevated one another. And isn’t that kind of the ideal scenario when it comes to a flavored lube?
What do you think, dear readers? Would you ever try a pickle-flavored lube? Do you think this is a terrible idea, or a great one?
This post was NOT sponsored, I really just wanted to ramble at you about pickle lube. LubeLife did send me the product for free, though.