What is cotton rope?
Cotton rope is a natural product that has become established in many hobby areas such as martial arts and yoga, as well as in medical fields like occupational and physical therapy. It is even found in kindergartens because the great advantage of the material is that it is soft and does not cause burns when it is pulled over the skin or unintentionally slips quickly through the fingers. For this reason,cotton ropes are also very popular in rope bondage or Shibari, subfields of BDSM, alongside jute and hemp ropes.
What is a cotton rope used for?
The erotic aspect of bondage with cotton rope is its unmistakable feel: it simply feels good on the skin. In contrast to hemp ropes, for example, it feels neither hard nor threatening, but on the contrary cozy and pleasant. For this reason, ropes made from cotton rope are also popular with people who are not really interested in BDSM.
The rope has some give, which is very practical for beginners. Since cotton rope is stretchy and yields when pulled too tight, there is less risk of cutting off blood circulation or damaging nerves.
What do I have to consider when using it?
A cotton rope is never one hundred percent tear-resistant. It would take a lot of force to cause it to break, but for safety reasons it should still only be tied on the floor. It also loses some of its tensile strength with every use, i.e. every knot and every wash.
With or without a “soul”: What do I need to consider when buying?
A distinction is made between cotton ropes with and without a core. Ropes without a core are hollow braided or twisted, which means, as the name suggests, that they are hollow in the middle and you can sort of see into them. This means that they lie flat against the skin. The knots of cotton ropes without a core are not particularly thick and tighten quickly. This makes them suitable for types of play such as net bondage, but not for greater strain, let alone suspension bondage.
With cotton rope with a core, the actual rope is braided around a strand of individual, slightly twisted soft cotton threads, which is known as the core or heart.
Cotton rope with a core is bulkier, stronger and more tear-resistant than cotton rope without a core. Knots do not tighten as much on cotton rope with a core and are easier to undo. Be careful with ropes for mountaineering and sailing, which have a hard core made of solid (plastic) material. They are not suitable for erotic bondage and are also not made for bondage.
Parts of this text were first published on Baumwollseil.de, one of Germany’s first online shops for kink, eroticism, and BDSM, and were kindly provided to Deviance.
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