“I was reconnecting to my body, my sexuality and relationship with my partner,” she says. “I also needed a lubricant because I had birth trauma. I was trying all these products. I didn’t connect to any of them, their packaging or their brand story. It didn’t seem like any of them were speaking to me, so I saw an opportunity to make these products kind of merge.”

Field Trip launched in November with five products priced from $25 to $88: Aphrodesia Super Butter, Aphrodesia Superoil, Flora Forever Superoil, Dry Brush and Superfluid, a pH balanced water-based lubricant. “Lubricant and body care should be placed together,” says Toronchuk, adding, “I need to figure out what feels good to me before I can communicate to my partner. I really liked the idea of combining the body care and the intimacy brand.”

As the sexual wellness boom of the past few years converges with beauty’s current body care craze, brands are strategically spanning the body, intimate care and sexual wellness categories to provide consumers a holistic approach to total self-care. Along with Field Trip, brands that offer body care and intimate care with a decidedly sexy slant include Her Place, Ina Labs, WooWoo, Naydaya, Love Foy and Beia Beauty.

All have a mix of conventional body care—think body washes and scrubs—and sex care products like vulva oils and lubes. Menopause brands like Womaness, La Maria and Stripes incorporate traditional and intimate skincare products in their collections to offer comprehensive support for the myriad of issues people in menopause deal with.

Skincare and body care assist brands selling sexual wellness merchandise with entrances into beauty retailers, where sexual wellness remains a nascent category. Before Ulta Beauty kicked off a collection it calls Intimate Wellness last year with vibrators from Crave, Unbound and SmileMakers, it unveiled The Wellness Shop assortment in 2019 with a Care Down There vertical containing the brands Fur and SweetSpot Labs. Ulta’s Intimate Wellness now lives within The Wellness Shop.

Spanning adjacent product categories can open doors—literally—for brands. This month, intimate care specialist Beia, along with sex toy maker Vush, is arriving at prestige department store Neiman Marcus’s first-ever in-store sexual wellness collection with three products priced from $20 to $48: Body & Intimacy Serum, Refresh Wipes and Daily Hydrating & Setting Mist. Neiman Marcus is Beia’s inaugural retailer.

Beia founder Brittany Lo reports the brand was attractive to Neiman Marcus’s buying team expressly for its bridging of elevated skincare and sexual wellness. “Instead of creating a lube that you’re hiding in the back of your sock drawer, it’s in a glass bottle with gold, and you’re displaying it on your night stand. It’s a very subtle way of leaning into sexual wellness,” she says. “They like that because they’re like, ‘We need help on how to subtly also lean into this category without offsetting our brand, our customers.’”

Lo continues that Beia’s brand ethos is to produce “serious skincare for your personal pleasure’” She says, “I purposely made sure that the skincare component was top of the line just like the sexual wellness. If I was just another skincare brand, no one at Neman Marcus would’ve paid attention to us. We got in through sexual wellness, but then they have the added benefit, once they liked that sexual wellness component, to also double dip into the skincare piece of it.”

To that end, on top of the sexual wellness selection, Beia will be sold in Neiman Marcus’s Trending Beauty curation at its New York, Boston and Dallas locations. “From a retailer perspective, they’re able to merchandise us as a Trending Beauty brand in skincare, but they’re also able to merchandise us now with the sexual wellness component, and we don’t cannibalize any of their existing offerings,” says Lo. “It’s truly an add-on. So, for them, they can merchandise us as skincare or sexual wellness and know that we’re not going to compete with their already existing offerings.”

Even if a brand launches squarely in one category or another, many sexual wellness brands are branching into body care and skincare, and skincare and body care brands are branching into sexual wellness. Solid body care and skincare brand Kate McLeod introduced Sex Stone in 2021. When Sephora picked up the brand last year, the beauty specialty retailer brought on the $45 solid lubricant with Kate McLeod’s solid moisturizers.

Skincare brand OSEA Malibu grew its product lineup with $38 prebiotic-powered V Cleanse vulva cleanser in 2020. In 2021, Dr. Barbara Sturm introduced its V Collection with $75 V Wash and $100 V Drops. Sephora scooped up the products for its online array of intimate wellness products.

SmileMakers has gone in the opposite direction, beginning in the bedroom and forging ahead with products that can be used in and out of it. For Valentine’s Day, the brand has unveiled $29.95 candles and the $30 Erotic Kneads Massage Oil. The products will be available at Saks Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdale’s, Revolve and Free People.

SmileMakers brand director Cecile Gasnault says the new products are part of an effort to expand consumers’ often stifling definition of sex. “We as a society have limiting beliefs when it comes to sex. Sex is not just penetrative sex. Sex is not just about genital stimulation,” she explains. “Other regions of the body can feel incredibly erotic to stimulate. Sex is not just about touch. All our senses come into play and our brain is the most powerful sex organ. We realized that our offering was perpetuating these limiting beliefs.”

Since its start in 2018, Maude has embraced body care, intimacy and sexual wellness with a range of sex toys, lubricants, candles, personal care, condoms and more. Its versatility has landed the brand in over 300 retail stores around the world, as well as online at Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdale’s and Sephora.

To Maude founder Éva Goicochea, the crossover between traditional beauty and sexual wellness makes perfect sense, but it’s historically been mishandled. “Beauty and fragrance have long borrowed from sex, using evocative imagery and ads to sell you products,” she says. “Yet, sexual wellness has marketed actual sex in an explicit, crude way. Maude is changing this. We’re here to bring a smart, provocative sexiness to a category that should have always had it—for the bedroom and beyond.”

Maude plans to further move beyond the bedroom and into body care this year as it doubles down on differentiating itself from other sex toy brands. “Our take on the category is that it should be holistic, from sex basics to body care, fragrance to ingestibles,” says Goicochea. “Our next launch cements our assortment as a complete line of intimate care, and we’re looking forward to working with retailers to see that sensibility and approach on the shelves.”

But it’s not as easy as it may seem to stretch into tangential categories. Poorly executed extensions can erode brand equity. Jane Hong Fernandez, CEO of Onda, a clean beauty retailer owned by biotechnology company Amyris, warns against brands losing focus in today’s super-competitive beauty market. She’s discovered that brands excellent in one category frequently struggle in another.

“They don’t do it as well, and they lose their core demographic, their beachhead market, their earliest adopters, because they’re like, ‘Wait, I feel like the quality went down,’” says Hong Fernandez. “Then, they look at the SKUs, and they’re like, ‘No wonder, they’re doing a hundred things.'”

While she’s wary of brands spreading themselves too thin, Hong Fernandez believes body care brands can lean into sex without officially launching a sexual wellness product. She highlights the brands Uma Oils and Costa Brazil, which, like Onda, is owned by Amyris, as examples of companies creating sexy and sensual products that aren’t expressly for intimacy.

Speaking of Costa Brazil and its founder Francisco Costa, formerly women’s creative director at Calvin Klein, she says, “He understands sensuality and the body. He understands the fit of a garment, and I think that translates so naturally. His body oils are some of our top sellers. He thinks about the way the oils drip on your body, the scent. It’s by far the most sensual brand for body.”

Hong Fernandez doesn’t see the premium body care and wellness boom slowing, a positive indication for brands interested in jumping into the category. “Self-care is front of mind, and people are willing to indulge. Even in this macroeconomic environment, they’re pulling back on other things,” she says. “Before you used to be like, ‘I’ll just slather myself in the drugstore body lotion, but my face is my face.’ Now people talk about body aging. There’s innovation in body treatments, there’s a solution for everything at this point, and people are trading up.”

When it comes to further brand expansion, Toronchuk believes modern intimacy brands can look far beyond the beauty and device categories while still staying true to their mission.

“The sky’s the limit,” she enthuses. “There’s so many other things that you can add. Prompt cards where you ask your partner a question could be something playful. I really do think there’s lots to explore besides the toy side. It’s kind of all-encompassing.”