The Patent Leather Bow Wrist Restraint is an adorable wrist restraint set. I saw it on the Surrender of O pornographic DVD during one of their sex scenes, and I knew I wanted to have it.

These restraints are made from metal, leather, and patent leather (it basically looks like vinyl). The set basically includes a few parts. The bow itself, the restraints, and a piece of soft red suede keeps the beautiful heart-shaped lock and keys together for shipping. At the widest point, I'd say it could fit wrists of about three inches wide, and it goes down to about an inch. Because of the leather material being flexible, those aren't absolute measurements. Honestly, though, with the ranges that are included, this should fit every wrist imaginable. Jor has tiny wrists, and it fits him fine, and I have bigger wrists, and I'd easily have room to escape. The entire set weighs virtually nothing, but the bow is about ten inches long and the little tails hang down about another ten inches.

So how do these work? I'd never paid attention enough to the picture to know, but after watching it on the movie, it all made sense. See, you have the leather material of the restraints themselves. This material has holes in it and a metal piece in the middle of the restraints. You place your wrists onto either side of the metal piece and then fold over the leather pieces over your wrist and slide one of the holes into the metal piece. From there, after you have both wrists in, you place the bow overtop of your wrists onto the metal piece. (The bow has a hole in the middle where the metal piece slides in.) From there, you use the heart-shaped lock, and you slide the lock through and lock it. Now it restrains.

So now you know how it works. What can you do with it? You can choose to use it without the bow on it and just use the restraints. If you are small enough, you could use this to restrain the upper arms instead of just the wrists. You could restrain a wrist to a chair leg (not sure why you need a bow for that). You could use these cute restraints as the focus of your next erotic picture.

Erotic pictures are honestly where I think this product really shines. The bow is absolutely gorgeous, and it's hot to see such a gorgeous wrist set - especially since it's made from a vinyl-like material. Because of the time this takes to put on compared to a regular pair of cuffs, it also makes this better suited for pictures. Instead of just sliding in and buckling, you have to find a semi-flat surface, measure the holes right, put on the bow, then fight with the lock to get the thing to lock shut.

That was one of the bigger problems I had with the set: The lock. It wasn't the lock itself, but it was the amount of padding that end up on top of the metal piece. You had two layers of thick leather then about four layers of the think vinyl. After all of that, there was a very small space left on the metal piece to slide the lock on. This actually was made more difficult by actually binding your wrists so you could get out. Because your wrists are bound tightly, the leather didn't lay flat like it was intended, so it made for more "layers" and made it more difficult to fasten the lock on it. I found that best results come from something that would be pretty easy to squirm out of.

This is also a set that will take two hands to get fastened onto your plaything. The lock must be wiggled into place - even if you have extra room, and it has to be wiggled to get back out. Getting all of it to go into place is not a fast procedure - not ridiculous, but certainly not as easy as some of the velcro cuffs. It's also not something that can be just "taken off" in case of an emergency, but honestly, as I said, it's hard to get this tight enough that you can't just slip your hands out, so that's not that big of a deal.

I'm not sure if the vinyl bow will get "squished in" with time. If it does, that will make putting the lock in a lot easier because there will be a lot more room. That would make this much more feasible for rough play. It's not that the leather can't take the rough pulling (It can), it was that I couldn't get the restraints to go tightly enough and still get the lock on.

The leather restraint piece also sheds leather pieces like none other when you first get it. I didn't notice until I'd been messing with it, but I recommend you take it to the garbage can and just smooth all of the tiny fly-away pieces off of the leather before you play with it.

The lock is adorable. It's heart-shaped, and it makes me smile. The keys are small little keys that are shaped like little diary keys. This isn't the highest quality lock and key set, but I haven't had any problems with them refusing to close/open. If you are worried, you can buy little locks at your local mass merchandiser that will fit in just fine. We choose to use the little heart lock because it's adorable and adds to the picture-perfect quality of the set. It wouldn't be hard to force open if need be.

Once on, the cuffs are extremely comfortable. Jor says that the inside of the cuffs are really soft, and they usually were on loose enough to avoid hurting his skin at all. I imagine that, if this was tight, the leather is thick enough to make sweating a possibility.

The cleaning of this set should be minimal - if any. Wiping it down with antibacterial wipes is really the most you need to do if sharing this. It shouldn't come in contact with any bodily fluids or lubricant either since it's not fond of either of those. Wiping down the vinyl-material with a warm washcloth will make it shine again, and if you really want to clean your leather, there's leather cleaning material available in the shoe aisle of most mass merchandise stores. For the most part, though, antibacterial wipes will work fine. I recommend storing this set somewhere where the bow can lay flat and not get scrunched up. I think vinyl remembers crinkles even after unfolded for awhile.

Because of that, I recommend this mostly for photography purposes or gentle bondage. This cute set would not hold up to rough bondage - mostly because it's hard to tighten the restraints and still get the lock and key on. If your partner will willingly stay in the restraints, and you want something that looks gorgeous and friendly (and romantic!), this is perfect. I absolutely love them, and although they won't work for our rough play, these are perfect for erotic pictures or just feeling sexy in them. I'm fond of these, and I'm very happy we own them.

These are still freakin' adorable. We don't use them as much as we use other cuffs - just because it's so much of a pain in the butt to put these things on someone because of the multiple layers. However, if I ever want to do something for the sole purpose of looking cute while being restrained, these do work really well. However, for everyday bondage, we never pull these out since using other cuffs is so much easier.

The patent leather is holding up just fine - no fraying or anything. Wiping it down with a damp washcloth seems to keep the patent leather pretty shiny. The lock is still working just fine, and luckily, I haven't lost the keys yet.