Silicone is prone to trapping tiny air bubbles. You can see these air bubbles as little round dots inside the finished sex toy. While they aren't harmful, they are not pleasing in appearance.

If you find yourself making more than one or two sex toys, you might want to invest in a vacuum pump and vacuum chamber, which will remove the air bubbles by degassing the silicone.

Degassing is nothing more complicated than putting the mixed silicone into a vacuum chamber immediately after you mix it. This draws all the bubbles out of the silicone, so the finished sex toy is free of bubbles.

To do it, mix and color the silicone as normal. Then, before you pour the liquid silicone into the mold, put it in a vacuum chamber, turn on the pump, and keep it there until the silicone bubbles up and then collapses. The silicone will start to bubble, almost like boiling water, then swell up and collapse.

To do this, you'll need a vacuum chamber (mine is 3 gallon, but that turned out to be way too big; for making small numbers of sex toys, a one or two gallon chamber is fine) and a 1/4 horsepower vacuum pump. You can get both on Amazon or at hardware stores. Smaller vacuum pumps might not be powerful enough—you'll need something that can draw down to 28mm of mercury to work on Dragon Skin silicone.

What You’ll Need

• Stick with platinum-cure silicone from reputable vendors. You can find platinum-cure silicone on Amazon or direct from manufacturers like Smooth-On. A Smooth-On "trial kit" is plenty to make several sex toys; a one-gallon container can make dozens.