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, clinical or peer-reviewed sources, and any written answer a manufacturer has given us to a question we put to it — never hands-on measurement. When an answer comes to us that way rather than from a published page, we say so in the sentence that uses it, because you cannot open a private reply and check it for yourself. 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, expert sources, and any written answer a manufacturer has given us — and we say so up front. We never present research as personal testing.
Research comparisons
Where we publish a research comparison, we define its scope and document the criteria used for that specific use case — a long-distance comparison may foreground app control and connection reliability, for example. We do not present the set as a universal ranking or a hands-on verdict. Affiliate commissions play no part in which models are included, how they are described, or the order in which they appear — see our Affiliate Disclosure. A brand can prompt us to look at something, and one has; what a brand cannot do is change a verdict, an ordering, or what we criticise. Where a brand’s approach started a piece of coverage, we say so on that page.
One rule matters more than the rest: if we cannot identify a model with sufficiently documented information for a given category, we say so and leave it out. We do not manufacture a low-price, premium, or any other category slot simply to make a comparison look complete.
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.