“Intimacy” products have gone surprisingly mainstream. Between the Epsom salts and Ace bandages in your local pharmacy, innovations in personal lubricants (his and hers!) and condoms (climax control!) are keeping pace with razors (eight vibrating blades!), making it harder than ever to make Americans blush. But Masque, a dissolving strip designed to mask the taste of seminal fluid, might be the product to do it. The product’s story begins in 2006, when a Florida entrepreneur was dining with his wife and two other couples. As it invariably does in Florida, the conversation turned to oral sex, and the men wondered aloud: In the midst of this most charitable act, why does the generosity seem to run out at the moment when it’s most desperately needed? The wives at the table weren’t overly sympathetic, but they agreed: “if you can make it taste like chocolate syrup, we’re in.” Inspired, our intrepid entrepreneur (he prefers his name not be made public because of the conservative nature of his other enterprises) was determined to find out: Can I make semen taste better? He started by investigating products for men. Diet is reported to affect the taste of semen—pineapple juice, apple juice, and celery sweeten its flavor, while meat, milk, and fried foods are believed to make it bitter—with existing products like Semenex ($44.95) promising to deliver multiple glasses worth of pineapple juice in a serving. But the effect of dietary changes is unreliable and has a relatively minor effect at best. For supplements to work as advertised, a strict regimen must be followed, compromising spontaneity. So, our sementrepreneur concluded that a product for women was the way to go. Five years and approximately 30 prototypes later, researchers arrived at the current product: a dissolving oral strip placed on the tongue before the act. Masque delivers “a proprietary blend of six micro-encapsulated taste-masking agents, which block the three flavors associated with semen: salt, bitter, and protein,” COO Michael Guilfoyle explained in a phone call with Men’s Fitness. “It’s not that we just cover it with extraordinary amounts of chocolate flavor—she literally can’t taste the semen for between 10 and 15 minutes.” All three flavors—chocolate, strawberry, and watermelon—have a menthol kick, designed to overwhelm the olfactory system—so she can’t smell it either. Masque is launching an advertising campaign in women’s magazines starting this month. For now, it can be purchased only at Masque’s official website and at Amazon.com ($12 for a pack of 3). Guilfoyle expects Masque to be available in adult stores by December, and he says, “our goal is to be in CVS one day.” We all gotta have a dream.
