How We Review
Our recommendations are only as trustworthy as the process behind them. Here’s exactly how we evaluate the products we cover — more on who does the evaluating on our About page.
What we evaluate on
At this stage, every assessment is desk research — manufacturer specifications, app-store ratings, published owner reviews, and clinical or peer-reviewed sources — never hands-on measurement. We can’t confirm that the people writing owner reviews own the product, so we treat them as published opinion, not verified testimony, and we say where and when we read them. For every product, we look at:
- Body safety & materials — is it disclosed as genuinely non-porous, body-safe silicone/ABS/glass/steel? Is the material clearly stated by the manufacturer?
- Build & design, as documented — stated dimensions, listed materials, published controls.
- Performance, as documented — for app-controlled toys: manufacturer-stated connectivity (Bluetooth and, where relevant, long-distance/internet), listed features and intensity settings, and what published owner reviews say about real-world use.
- Battery & practicality, as documented — manufacturer-stated charge time, run time, IP waterproof rating, and cleaning instructions.
- Value — price relative to the specifications and features above.
- Privacy — for connected/app toys: the account and data questions worth asking before you connect one, and any publicly documented privacy or security incident involving the maker. We do not currently audit each maker’s privacy policy product by product, and we don’t claim to; where a guide has nothing specific to report on a product, it says nothing rather than implying a check we didn’t run.
Some of this — how an app actually feels to use, real-world noise, real charge and run time, control hand-off in practice — can only be judged hands-on. We don’t claim to have measured it until we have. Once hands-on testing begins, we’ll say so on the specific guide and describe our testing conditions there.
Hands-on vs. research-based — we tell you which
- Where a review is based on hands-on testing, we say so and describe what we tested. (At launch, our reviews are research-based — see above. As hands-on testing begins, we’ll describe our testing conditions right here.)
- Where we haven’t personally tested a product, we clearly label the piece as research-based, drawing on manufacturer specifications, app-store ratings, published user reviews, and expert sources — and we say so up front. We never present research as personal testing.
Best-of lists and rankings
Where we publish a ranked or “best of” guide, it follows the criteria above, weighted for the specific use case — a long-distance guide weights app control and connection reliability more heavily than size or discretion. Affiliate commissions and brand relationships play no part in ranking — see our Affiliate Disclosure.
One rule matters more than the rest: if we can’t identify an option we’d genuinely stand behind for a given category, we say so and leave it out. Roundups are usually built to fill every slot — cheapest pick, premium pick, one for every budget — whether or not something worth recommending exists at that price. We’d rather publish a shorter list and tell you why it’s short.
Corrections & updates
Spot an error or an outdated detail? Tell us: hello@closenesslab.com, or via our Contact page, and we’ll fix it. As the site and its guides age, we’ll also revisit them periodically to keep them current.