← How To Use
How to Use Ember: The Warming Massager
Device Guide
9 min read
Turn the warmth on ninety seconds before you touch yourself with it. Almost everything Ember does well starts with that one habit.
← How To Use
Ember warms to roughly body temperature and holds there, and that is a deliberately unspectacular number. It is not a heat pack. It is meant to stop feeling like an object. Room-temperature silicone against warm skin registers as a foreign thing arriving, and that interruption pulls attention outward at the moment you want it going inward. Everything else about Ember sits on top of that one property, and it only works if you give the heat the ninety seconds it needs.
Charge it fully. The heating element and the motor draw from the same battery, and a low battery shows up as warmth that arrives slowly and drifts rather than holding.
Wash it before first use. Warm water, mild unscented soap, hands rather than a cloth. Nothing antibacterial or heavily fragranced.
Water-based lubricant only, because silicone lubricant slowly degrades a silicone surface. Ember gives you a trick nothing else does: put the lubricant on the warm head rather than onto skin, and it arrives at body temperature. See lube 101.
Then turn the warmth on and leave it alone for sixty to ninety seconds. Check it against the inside of your forearm. Skipping this turns Ember into an ordinary vibrator for the first five minutes.
Two separate things, and they are worth telling apart because they call for different technique.
The first is physiological. Local heat produces vasodilation, meaning more blood flow through the tissue it touches. Genital arousal in women is fundamentally a vasocongestive event: blood fills the erectile tissue of the clitoris and the vaginal walls, producing swelling, lubrication and sensitivity, as Levin sets out in Archives of Sexual Behavior. Warmth does not create arousal on its own, but it moves the tissue in the same direction arousal moves it, which is why a warm start tends to shorten the warm-up.
The second is mechanical, from the musculoskeletal literature. Heat raises the extensibility of connective tissue and lowers the force needed to move a joint through range, which Petrofsky and colleagues measured at the knee in Medical Science Monitor in 2013. Malanga and colleagues, reviewing heat and cold in Postgraduate Medicine, describe the same effect alongside less sensation of muscle tightness. In plain terms, warm tissue gives more easily than cold tissue. That is the basis of the shoulders-and-thighs section below.
Technique follows from both. Give the heat a clear run before the motor starts, two minutes of warmth alone against the inner thigh, the lower stomach or the vulva with no vibration at all. Then bring the motor in at the lowest setting and leave the warmth on underneath it. Most people run Ember with the heat on continuously and the vibration climbing and dropping over the session, rather than the other way round.
Use it on lubricant, not next to it. Two or three drops on the head of the device, spread with a fingertip, and the moment where cold gel hits skin simply does not happen.
Treat body temperature as the point rather than a limitation. Because it holds at skin temperature, Ember can stay in contact for a long stretch without becoming the thing you are thinking about.
One. Turn the warmth on and do something else for ninety seconds. Check it on your forearm.
Two. Lie down somewhere private and put the warm head flat against your inner thigh or lower stomach, motor off, for two full minutes.
Three. Move it slowly along the inner thighs toward the vulva in long sweeps, still with no vibration.
Four. Put two drops of water-based lubricant on the warm head and spread them with a fingertip.
Five. Bring the motor in at the lowest setting, warmth still running, and rest the head against the clitoris rather than pressing it. Give it thirty seconds before changing anything.
Six. Going internal, insert slowly with the curve toward your navel until the tip meets the front wall five to eight centimetres in, then press up and back in a slow beckoning stroke, one every two seconds.
Seven. Come down through the lower settings, turn the heat off last, and wash it straight away.
Ember is genuinely built for this, and it is the part most people never use. A warm head and a motor is the combination a physiotherapist reaches for.
Start with position. Lay the flat of the head against the belly of the muscle, never on the bony ridge of the spine itself. On the shoulders, that means the thick band of trapezius between the neck and the point of the shoulder. Hold still for twenty to thirty seconds in one spot, let the warmth get in, then move two or three centimetres and hold again. Slow circles at about one per second work better than fast passes, and working outward from the centre of the back toward the shoulder follows the muscle rather than fighting it.
For the lower back, lie on your side and run Ember along the ropey muscle three or four centimetres either side of the spine, from the bottom of the ribs to the top of the pelvis. For glutes, sit on a firm chair and lean into the head under the meat of the buttock, which reaches deep rotators a hand cannot. For the thighs, long sweeps from just above the knee toward the hip, and the same sweeps slower on the inner thighs, which doubles as the warm-up above.
Ten to fifteen minutes on any one area is plenty before moving somewhere else, the same way you would rotate a warm compress rather than leave it in one place all evening. Feet and arches are underrated, and so is the space between the shoulder blades, which is almost impossible to reach with your own hands and easy with a wand.
Ember runs on its buttons alone, and the heat control is separate from the vibration control. You can run warmth with no vibration, vibration with no warmth, or both, and the first of those is a mode in its own right.
Steady modes suit the finish, because at the point of orgasm most people want predictability rather than variety. Pulses, waves and build sequences suit the long middle stretch. Our guide to vibration modes and patterns goes further.
The app adds patterns you build and save, sync to audio, and control handed to a partner.
Setting it up, and what each tile on the Play screen does, is covered in our guide to the Velvet Vibes app.
Ember has a partnered opening most devices do not: it starts as a back rub. Work outward from the spine, then the lower back, then the backs of the thighs, and let the direction of travel say what it says.
During sex, the warm head works well held against the clitoris from side-lying or from behind, and in the hands of a partner during oral or manual sex. Keep the warmth on: a skin-temperature device can rest in place far longer than one that reads as an object.
Across distance, one person can take the app and run intensity and patterns live. Agree the highest level either of you will use and a word that means stop now. More in our long-distance guide.
For the app side of that, creating a room, inviting someone and passing control back and forth, see Love Bridge and long-distance sessions.
Wash Ember immediately after use, warm water rather than hot, with a mild unscented soap, using your hands so you can feel the whole surface. Pay attention to the join between the head and the handle, where lubricant collects.
Pat dry with a lint-free cloth, then leave it out with air moving around it until it is dry everywhere, underside included. No hairdryer, no radiator. In a humid Indian summer, give it the extra ten minutes.
Store it dry, cool, out of direct sunlight, in its own pouch, not touching other silicone. Our cleaning and storing guide covers the shared-home question.
The warmth feels weaker than it did. Nearly always the battery, since the heating element is the first thing to soften as charge drops. A cold room also pulls heat from the head faster.
It does not feel warm at all. Check the heat control is on, separate from the motor control, and give it the full ninety seconds. Test on the inside of your forearm rather than your palm.
Vague sensation internally. In order of likelihood: not aroused enough, not enough pressure into the front wall, or too deep. Five to eight centimetres with firm pressure toward the pubic bone beats depth.
It will not charge. Wipe the magnetic contacts on both sides, and lay the device flat so the cable is not pulling the magnet sideways.
It will not turn on. Check the travel lock first.
It will not pair. Power the device off for five seconds, force-close the app, and toggle Bluetooth.
It sounds louder than it used to. Usually a low battery, occasionally water still sitting in the join.
How warm does it actually get? Roughly body temperature, and it holds there. It should read as skin rather than a heat pack, and can stay in contact indefinitely without becoming the thing you are thinking about.
How long does the warmth take to come up? Sixty to ninety seconds from cold. Switch the heat on before anything else and check it on your forearm.
Can I really use it on my shoulders? Yes, and it is the most underused thing about the device. Flat of the head on the muscle belly, twenty to thirty seconds per spot, then move. Stretch afterwards while the tissue is warm.
Can I use the warmth internally? Yes. Warm it first, use plenty of water-based lubricant, and insert slowly with the curve toward your navel so the tip meets the front wall five to eight centimetres in. More in what the G spot actually is.
How long should a session be? Ten to fifteen minutes on one body area before moving on, and twenty to thirty minutes as a sensible ceiling for intimate use.