The Best and Most Realistic Sex Dolls in 2024

There's no shortage of loneliness in this world. For some, it's a lack of friends or family, while others find an emptiness in their lives where romantic love should be.1

Filling those gaps can seem daunting. A sex doll can make an enormous difference in this regard, offering individuals an opportunity to connect in a way that's more natural than some might think.2

In this guide, we'll break down everything you need to know to get a sex doll that will suit your needs. If you don't have much time, check out our simplified recommendations below.

With rare exceptions, the top sex doll makers don’t sell their dolls directly. Instead, they use authorized distributors, many of which have warehouses in the U.S. to expedite your experience. For most people, we’d highly recommend choosing a WM Doll (maker) through Rosemary Doll (distributor). The prices are very good, and the customization options are wide-ranging.

There are several critical factors when selecting a doll. If you want to grab something that’s in stock so you can get it sooner, you’ll sacrifice a few customization options, but there are some things you should keep in mind.

Materials

The material question among sex dolls primarily comes down to two options: silicone and thermoplastic elastomer (TPE). Each has its advantages; silicone provides superior durability and a lifelike appearance, while TPE offers a lower cost, better heat retention, and a more lifelike feel.

Ultimately, this is a matter of budget and personal preference, but it can be challenging to develop a preference without first interacting with each material. We recommend combining the two whenever possible, placing a silicone head on a TPE body. This approach keeps costs down without sacrificing a realistic face. The only downside to the TPE body is that it requires slightly more maintenance, specifically regarding moisture, which silicone repels more naturally.

Cost

Very few sex dolls could be called inexpensive. The price of materials and the labor that goes into their construction quickly drive up the cost for manufacturers, and you'll feel that in your wallet significantly. Counterfeit dolls on the market are about half the original cost, but we strongly advise against these for various reasons.

We found that Better Love Doll seems to have the best deals on legitimate products, though Rosemary Doll occasionally throws in enough freebies with certain purchases that the costs can offset in its favor. If price is your concern, though, Better Love Doll is often the best place to start looking.

For comparative purposes, here’s how several distributors compare in base cost and the cost of models upgraded to our preferred specs:

The upgraded price for the Rosemary Doll version is less than either SexySexDoll or Sexy Real Sex Dolls.

Customization

You can save a little bit of money by buying a prefabricated doll without customization, but we feel that customization makes this whole process unique. It can be something as simple as changing the eye color of a doll that makes you connect with it more deeply, but you'll have access to a lot more variables than that.

Many sites let you choose a head from an extensive collection, with details like eyes, lips, hair, and more at your discretion. From the neck down, you can adjust skin tone, breast texture, areola size and color, and overall flexibility. We highly recommend opting for the more flexible options and whatever features a site offers that let the doll stand on its own.

Some sites allow you to build a doll from the ground up, giving you control over more bodily features like bust and waist size. There is also the occasional ability to have them construct a custom head from reference photographs. From what we've seen, their abilities in this department are very impressive, but you’ll have to be able to afford the price, which often runs upwards of $10,000. Among distributors who can provide custom heads from photographs, we think Rosemary Doll’s work is the most impressive.

Durability

Durability starts with materials, which require different maintenance levels depending on how you use them. TPE is notably more absorbent than silicone, so it can be prone to mildew or bacterial contamination if you don't keep it dry. This is especially true of any orifices. For ease of cleaning and maintenance, we recommend removable sex organs wherever available. Many distributors offer care kits and cleaning kits, as well.

Durability is also one of the reasons we recommend a more flexible skeleton. While additional joints may add to the number of vulnerabilities on a given doll, the lack of those joints makes it too easy to flex the doll in a manner that it wasn’t built to handle. That can potentially damage the skeleton, the silicone/TPE, or other components.

Proper storage is also crucial to ensure that the doll doesn’t develop any creases in its skin. Rosemary Doll is the only one of our top distributors to offer a comprehensive hanging system that allows you to store your doll properly. Other companies offer hooks that adhere to the neck joint, but if your doll’s body is taller than the height of whatever bar you use to hang it, it could get damaged over time.

Privacy

There's a potential stigma associated with owning a sex doll, unfortunately. That's just one of the reasons that companies must safeguard your privacy. And a box big enough to contain a life-size sex doll could draw curiosity. Fortunately, most doll companies take pains to conceal the contents of their shipping boxes. With our top recommendations, you don't have to worry about exterior branding or obvious shipping labels giving away what's inside.

As for your online privacy, you can expect all of these companies to use cookies and other trackers the same way almost every site does. However, they all employ secure checkout protocols to safeguard your most sensitive data.

Audrey is a 5’5” C-cup doll that weighs just under 73 lbs. On Rosemary Doll’s site, she goes by Audrey, but she’s Jane, Lara, and Charlie on other sites. And despite being the same doll from the same manufacturer, each distributor offers slightly different customizations and prices, as you can see below. (Prices also change during periodic sales, so you can use the base price links below to check current pricing.)

As you can see, only Rosemary Doll offers a large number of heads, the largest number of eye colors, and the only free breathing system in the bunch. YourDoll has the lowest upgraded price of the four, but it’s important to note that not all preferred upgrades were available, and its head selection was only about 20% as large as others. For the upgrades we like to see, Rosemary Doll offers the best value.

At Innerbody Research, we extensively test each health service or product we review, including sex dolls and online stores. Our hands-on testing gives us unique insights into the customer experience and the quality of these products.

We also performed extensive comparisons of stock, prices, and available features on the same models across multiple distributors to determine where you can get the most for your money. And our research team spent dozens of hours studying the differences in commonly used materials and manufacturing methods in the industry.

Additionally, like all health-related content on this website, this review was thoroughly vetted by one or more members of our Medical Review Board for accuracy.

Over the past two decades, Innerbody Research has helped tens of millions of readers make more informed decisions about staying healthy and living healthier lifestyles.

A sex doll is a life-size doll with realistic features, including anatomical features capable of penetrating or being penetrated. They're often made of soft materials like TPE or silicone, and most are anatomically correct enough to allow their owners to use them for sexual pleasure. Some dolls lean more into fantasy than reality, and their appearance may not be entirely human or completely realistic. Still, these count as sex dolls.

Some dolls also begin to drift into the realm of robots, with rudimentary integrated AI systems, pre-recorded vocal responses to pleasure, and even movable eyes and mouths. These are no more or less sex dolls than inanimate silicone models, but they do give us a glimpse into where this market is headed.

Fake doll warning

Believe it or not, there is a robust market for counterfeit sex dolls. The companies on our list are approved vendors for major doll manufacturers, most of which are based in China. These manufacturers make the parts and sell them to the vendors who warehouse them (the exception being RealDoll, which makes and sells products directly). That's why you'll almost always see many more customization options on vendor sites than on manufacturer sites.

But, some counterfeit manufacturers and vendors seek to emulate what the best are doing at a fraction of the cost. They will often use the same product photography the original manufacturer created to sell their imitation goods.

You can guard yourself against these dolls: don't fall for prices that are too good to be true. Manufacturers set an MSRP, and most vendors land around 10% or 15% below that. If you see the same doll on another site for 50% off or more, you can be sure it's fake. Many counterfeit sites also don’t let you search by brand. Instead, you can search by features like height, weight, cup size, etc. This is typically a red flag.

When you decide that you want to buy a sex doll, there are still plenty of choices that lie ahead, ranging from the proportions of the doll itself to various degrees of customization. These are the most common paths available to you for making a purchase.

Off-the-rack dolls

These dolls are typically listed as “in-stock” or “ready-to-ship.” They’re often fully assembled or close to fully assembled at a given distributor’s warehouse. The benefits of off-the-rack dolls are usually lower prices and much faster processing and shipping times. The downside is mainly a limit to what you can customize.

The chart below offers info on the same model from SY Doll sold by Rosemary Doll and SexySexDoll with customization options compared to a ready-to-ship version of the same model through Your Doll and Sexy Real Sex Doll.

That chart should give you a sense of the various customization options you give up when you buy off-the-rack, but it should also reinforce how much less expensive that can be. You stand to save several hundred dollars compared to customizable models, and you’re likely to get your doll much faster since it’s already assembled. And you can also see why Your Doll is our top pick for off-the-rack options, as its doll is identical to the one from Sexy Real Sex Dolls, but it costs $300 less.

Named dolls

Dolls listed on distributor websites are given names when they’re available as shown in the images, which include everything from head to toe. This is in contrast to customizable base bodies that don’t mandate or even suggest a first head and aren’t assembled yet, so customization options are more wide-ranging.

Custom base bodies

A close examination of any distributor’s catalog will reveal that several named dolls use the same base body but have been given certain heads and features to sell them as ideas. Some distributors lock you into that first head selection based on this design. Others let you swap that first head in addition to getting a second head (a common freebie).

On sites where you can’t swap out that first head, it makes sense to look into custom base bodies. It might take some scrolling, but you can usually find the same body you see used for most named dolls available as a custom base. From there, you can customize the same aspects you’d encounter with any named doll.

Delivery considerations

When you order a sex doll, you need to plan on receiving a large box. No matter which doll you choose, the package that arrives will be pretty heavy. The large size could make some neighbors curious about the contents of the box, but rest assured that all of the distributors we recommend in this guide only ship discreetly in boxes that don't reveal anything about the nature of what's inside. They're nondescript, but they are big. (A person could easily assume that it's a box of unassembled furniture.)

For instance, take this box below, which one of our testers received from Better Love Doll. (The 28oz can of tomatoes on top was just to give you a sense of scale before it became part of a puttanesca sauce.) The box measured 55 inches long and weighed 80lb.

An 80lb piece of luggage would be heavy but probably not an irregular shape to lift. But given their length, boxes like the one above require some care. Some people might simply be able to lift and move it. If you happen to have a dolly, it's a piece of cake. But assuming something like 80lb is too heavy for you to carry safely, and you don't own a dolly, gently dragging the boxes worked well for our testers when the durability of floors wasn't a concern. Another option if you have wood floors is to move the box in stages. If the box arrives upright, as in the picture above, you can start by carefully easing one side of it down to the ground in the direction you want to move it. Then, lift from the backside till the box is once again in an upright position, before carefully easing it down — again, in the direction you want to move the box. You can repeat those steps until you've moved the box where you want it to be, in box-length increments. We found that this method worked really well, too.

One of the best things about sex dolls is the degree to which you can customize them. If you're especially budget-conscious, you might end up with a more "off-the-rack doll." Those dolls can be quite impressive, but if you're already spending a bit of money on a doll, there are a few things you can upgrade that can really make it feel unique.

Here are just a few examples of common customization options:

Not all vendors are created equal in the customization department. Here's a look at how several top vendors let you customize the same base doll from manufacturer WM Dolls. The base model goes by a different name with each vendor, but it's the same 5'5" C-cup soldier character with pigtails you see in our staff pick section at the top of the guide.

We've included the base price and what each doll costs if you added all optional upgrades listed in the chart. Other options are also available, but those listed appear to be the core possibilities.

Sex dolls could benefit just about anybody who wants one, but there is still only a subset of society that considers buying one. The big reason for this is perceived stigma. There is very little research into the motivations or lifestyles of doll owners.3 But if you read the way the abstracts are written in what few papers exist, it's clear that the authors often intend to find something wrong, immoral, or dangerous about the owners.

Newer research has begun to look at owners in comparison to non-owners, and one paper found that owners’ psychological profiles made them less likely to commit a sexual offense than non-owners.4

The truth is that sex dolls serve more purposes than just sexual gratification. Single men and women buy them, certainly. Couples are a large doll demographic, as are people with disabilities or parents whose adult children suffer from physical or mental ailments that leave them socially isolated. Some people use dolls to explore their sexuality.

But even if these dolls only existed for pure sexual satisfaction, that shouldn't be a problem. There is far less stigma around other implements used for sexual gratification — from warming lubricants to prostate massagers and a bevy of other sex toys.

Ultimately, it's a matter of perspective, and it does seem that our view on sex dolls is moving in a positive direction, at least if sales numbers are any indication. In a May 2020 issue of Forbes, for instance, one sex doll distributor’s founder said, "We have lots of products in stock, but we can't work fast enough to keep up with demand."5 The number of people buying sex dolls is much, much bigger than the number of people who’ll admit it — just like virtually any product related to sexuality.

Sex doll manufacturers don’t typically sell their own products directly to consumers. Instead, they use authorized distributors to allow customers the most customization options and the fastest turnaround times. But knowing a bit about the manufacturers at the top of the market can help you decide where to start looking when you head to a distributor’s website.

Here’s a quick look at the top sex doll makers in the business, with a top pick from each based on our testing and research.

WM Doll — Great choice for most people

Top pick: 166cm C-cup

WM Doll offers an outstanding balance of quality and cost, with many of its dolls starting below $2,000. Many are available with outstanding upgrades like breathing systems or — from some distributors — silicone replacement heads. WM’s lineup is predominantly TPE, but the body types you’ll find run the gamut from slender, petite women with small breasts to more voluptuous figures.

Irontech — Great choice for silicone dolls and large cup sizes

Top pick: 159cm E-cup (silicone head, TPE body)

Irontech is one of the premier manufacturers in the business, with its silicone line presenting an affordable entry point to those not interested in TPE, even if they are a little pricier to start than WM’s TPE collection. Some of Irontech’s configurations are all silicone, while others offer our preferred combination: a silicone head on a TPE body.

The ability to customize internal vaginal texture and add powerful suction features is also an added bonus. We also appreciate the tanned skin option, which has tan lines corresponding to a thong bikini for added realism.

RealDoll — Best brand for top-tier AI models

Top pick: RealDollX Serenity

You’ll see RealDoll listed in our distributor breakdown, as well, since it’s one of the few companies to make and distribute its products. There are fewer base bodies to choose from, and they’re significantly more expensive than offerings from WM or Irontech, but there’s no denying that Real Doll has been a pioneer in the space. The company has some of the most interesting tech integrations around, and its artificial intelligence models are more advanced than the competition.

YL Doll — Great option for people who love large breasts

Top pick: 166cm J-cup

While YL Doll’s lineup is fairly diverse, it provides more choices with uncommonly large breast sizes than other top players. It gets into N-, O-, and P-cup territory, where most others top out around G. This J-cup model offers what we think is a good balance for those interested in large-breasted models, but there are certainly bigger options in the company’s lineup.

FanReal Doll — Ideal for a high-end silicone experience

Top Pick: 158cm C-cup

FanReal deals exclusively in high-end silicone models designed to be as realistic as possible. Its prices are higher than the likes of WM Doll or Irontech but lower than RealDoll. Most of its available heads are Asian or white, without the additional skin tone options offered by other manufacturers.

There are dozens of brands in addition to these, but this list represents what we feel are your best options for various needs, and most are available through top-tier distributors, which we’ll describe next.

Best place to buy dolls, best for male dolls, and best for head-to-toe customization

Rosemary Doll offers an enormous range of dolls, with more customization options per manufacturer than anyone else. That makes it a great choice to grab a basic model and outfit it with everything from a new head to special features — like a body heating system or real human hair.

Perhaps the most compelling offering from Rosemary Doll is its hyper-realistic body painting, which is available on both silicone and TPE bodies. And while various add-ons for any doll can raise the price dramatically, the base prices for these hyper-realistic models are remarkably low.

Rosemary Doll also offers frequent sales that make its prices much more competitive. These sales can vary by brand, but they often include free second heads, skeleton upgrades, standing feet, clothing, removable vaginas, gel breasts, and more.

AI robots

Rosemary Doll has a selection of seven robotic companions made by AI Tech. What sets these robots apart from others is the integrated LCD touchscreen on the back of their heads. That's where you can customize various parameters of the doll through a straightforward Android operating system.

They come with an advanced chatting function that can understand and respond to you from an internal bank of words, phrases, and sentences.

AI models are outfitted with touch sensors in the arms, legs, breasts, and vagina, allowing them to respond to stimulation. Their speech function provides a moaning sound in response to your touch. They can perform subtle facial expressions with eyes that can blink and look around.

For some users, these features will be a welcome advancement over otherwise inactive dolls. But we still haven’t seen a doll that can blink, speak, and move its eyes in a way that isn’t a little bit unsettling. This technology will continue to improve.

AI Tech robots also have full-body heating systems to bring the doll's temperature to roughly 98.6 degrees. Unfortunately, the controls for that heating system are separate from the touchscreen interface and require the use of an additional outboard controller.

Total customization

It's possible to use Rosemary Doll's services for a complete custom job, including a custom, one-of-a-kind head the company can make from scratch. All you have to do is provide its artisans with at least one reference photo (more photos should increase the accuracy of the final product).

From there, the company will create a demo head for your approval and then mold the final head. After that, you can have the head placed on any body type with any proportion, color, and special features available through their partner manufacturers.

It takes some time, and the cost ranges from $3,000 to $10,000, but it's the most comprehensive custom work you can get.

Male dolls through Rosemary Doll

Often, male doll selections feel like an afterthought for many distributors. They’ll keep a few on hand that can presumably satisfy most customers. But we found that Rosemary Doll offers a wider selection of male dolls than most — 15 full-size models compared to four from SexySexDoll, nine from Sexy Real Sex Dolls, and ten from YourDoll.

Best high-end dolls and best AI dolls

If there's one name that anyone who's heard of sex dolls might know, it's RealDoll. It’s had some impressive press coverage, including a spot on the HBO series Real Sex in 1999. Back then, its products were described as the "world's most expensive sex dolls," and that title mostly holds true today.

The question is whether you get what you pay for in terms of quality and service. For the most part, that answer is yes. RealDoll's products are made to strict specifications exclusively out of silicone. It offers some of the most realistic appearances, and its customization options are generous, if not comprehensive.

There are a few different lines of dolls in the RealDoll catalog. Where customization options are available, you can sometimes opt to buy the doll as listed on the site to save some money.

RealDollX smartphone app

RealDoll used to offer a trio of smartphone apps that worked for different aspects of its service. The company has since condensed its offerings into a single app, which is much more sensible. This app, RealDollX, offers integration with and control over various aspects of any RealDollX AI model.

Another aspect of the app doesn't require you to own a sex doll at all. It's more about offering you a relationship with a customizable woman in a digital space. The company claims that the learning model allows you to get to know the digital girlfriend over time and that she’ll become more complex the more you use the app. Users who find the relationship rewarding might want to consider upgrading to a sex doll.

As far as we can tell, the app does not offer male companions at this time. The app is also currently only available for Android, with an iOS version in the works. You can’t get the app from Google’s app store, either. You have to go through the RealDollX app’s dedicated website.

Best affordable option

After the many hours we’ve spent assembling packages for various dolls from multiple manufacturers on all the top distributors’ websites, Better Love Doll has consistently outperformed the competition in terms of cost. Its base prices are typically lower than those of its competitors, and the included freebies and discounted upgrades result in total packages that are often better deals than you’ll find elsewhere.

What’s most striking about the company, though, is that it’s the only reputable distributor we’ve found that has an actual return policy. Typically, return policies from doll distributors can be summed up in three words: All sales final. But Better Love Doll gives you 30 days to request an actual return. You’ll have to pay for return shipping, which will be expensive, but there are no added fees like a restocking fee to increase the pain.

Of course, you can’t take the doll for a spin and then return it. The doll must be unused. But if you open the package and find that it doesn’t live up to your expectations, you aren’t stuck with it.

What you sacrifice for lower prices and a functioning return policy isn’t too much for many potential customers. You likely won’t have as many heads to choose from as you might with a different distributor. And there are no AI models in sight, which is growing more unusual among distributors as manufacturers create more AI systems for their dolls. There also isn’t any ground-up customization like you see from Rosemary Doll and some others, so you can’t dream up a doll from scratch. But for low base prices and relatively low prices, even with a fair amount of recommendable upgrades, Better Love Doll is a smart choice.

Best for dolls off the rack (no or limited customization)

Your Doll is a verified distributor of sex dolls from nearly 30 manufacturers worldwide. Its base prices are among the lowest in the industry, even if only by a few dollars compared to the competition. Still, with common freebies like standing feet, EVO skeletons, and hyper-realistic body painting, you stand to get a lot for your money, especially if you don’t mind limiting yourself to those free extras and upgrades. The company’s paid upgrades, like its breathing systems and ball-joint hand skeletons, are often slightly more expensive than others. That said, Your Doll is one of the few companies to offer freckles as an option on your companion's face or body (at $49 each).

Your Doll also sells AI sex dolls, and it boasts a larger number of base models than anyone else in our guide, with models from both SE Doll and SY Doll. It also has the option to add three-speed automatic oral sex functions to AI models from SE Doll. Many other AI companions don't even offer the mouth as an available orifice due to the mechanisms involved in their speech and expressions, let alone as an orifice that can be mechanized.

But its AI manufacturers limit the dolls' robotics and intellect to the head. That means it lacks the touch sensors and body heaters standard in other AI companions. You can add the heater during the customization phase, but there is no option to add touch sensitivity.

SexySexDoll has pricing that often edges out the competition. Though it isn't universally the case, you can easily find models that cost you about $100 less than they would cost at Rosemary Doll, for instance.

The most budget-friendly sex doll will be one that comes with standard-issue features as opposed to add-ons, nice-to-haves, and all of the various customization paths that you could choose. But while SexySexDoll has strong baseline prices, the cost-saving pattern often extends to those optional features as well.

This means if you’re interested in investing a bit more for enhanced features like body heat, moaning, and ultra-soft body, you’ll often find that they're a bit more affordable here. Same with the innovative, lubricant-free TPE removable vaginas, which make cleaning and maintenance a breeze and perform excellently — at SexySexDoll, they're among the least expensive that we have encountered anywhere. Some other vendors only carry the removable silicone inserts.

The company also offers freebies and upgrades — like an extra wig or customizable joint stiffness — more often than any vendor except perhaps Rosemary Doll. When you combine all of these factors, you stand a good chance of saving money at SexySexDoll.

There are a few tradeoffs, though, as always. In terms of selection, SexySexDoll excels in some cases and falls a bit short of the competition in others. Its head selection is robust and only surpassed by Rosemary Doll. At the same time, it carries fewer brands than some other top competitors, and its selection of male dolls is small compared to other vendors.

Sexy Real Sex Dolls is a verified vendor for 20 major doll manufacturers. It has plenty of options to satisfy most tastes, and its customization system is straightforward, even if it lacks some of the finer points you'll see elsewhere.

SRSD has one of the largest head selections in our guide, and it makes it easy to pair a silicone head with a TPE body, which is one of our favorite approaches to a custom build. It keeps pace with most competitors in other customization areas until you start looking for premium features.

Top-shelf upgrades like body heat, simulated breathing, and moaning aren't available on every sex doll. And there doesn't seem to be much logic behind which dolls can and can't have those features. Our testers couldn't find a common denominator; neither materials nor brand seemed to influence their availability.

However, these upgrades tend to be costly, so if you're not interested in them, you might prefer SRSD for its head selection. And if you're lucky enough to choose a base model that can accept these upgrades, they'll be an option for you.

We also appreciate that SRSD offers discounts to military and emergency personnel, including:

• Active duty military
• Veterans
• Police
• Firefighters
• EMTs