Electro — e-stim, electrical play, violet wands — is the one modality at a party where a few of the contraindications are absolute, invisible, and not negotiable by how experienced anyone is. That's the reason it gets its own memo instead of a paragraph in 📝How to Host a Kink Event.

It's also, once you're past that, some of the most interesting sensation available. It produces feelings that don't exist anywhere else in kink — sensations you cannot make with a hand, a flogger, or a rope. Worth doing. Worth doing correctly.

The thing to understand up front: electro is not an intensity dial, it's a path. In most sensation play the risk scales with how hard you go. Here, most of the real risk is about where the current travels, and a low setting on a bad path is more dangerous than a high setting on a good one.

Who Should Not Do This

Not "should be careful." Should not.

Anyone with an implanted electronic device — pacemaker, ICD, neurostimulator, insulin pump, cochlear implant. This applies to everyone in the circuit, not only the person wearing electrodes, and it applies to the person holding a violet wand as much as the person receiving it.
Anyone pregnant.
Anyone with epilepsy or a seizure disorder.
Anyone with a heart condition, an arrhythmia, or a history of stroke.

These are the ones that belong on a posted sign at a station, so someone can rule themselves out by reading rather than by disclosing a medical condition to a room.

Who Should Be More Cautious

Anyone with metal in the current path. Genital and nipple piercings especially. Metal concentrates current into a small area and that's how burns happen. Remove it, or route the circuit so it isn't between the electrodes.
IUD wearers. Worth a real conversation before any internal play, and worth keeping current well away from it regardless.
Anyone with neuropathy, nerve damage, or diabetes with reduced sensation. Sensation reporting is the safety system here. If you can't feel a burn starting, there's no early warning left.
Anyone with broken skin, sunburn, fresh tattoos, eczema, or any active skin condition. No electrodes over any of it.
Anyone on medication affecting heart rhythm or sensation.
Anyone impaired. Electro is a harder no on substances than almost anything else, for the same reason as neuropathy — the whole safety mechanism is a person accurately reporting what they feel. See 📝SOBER for how to have that conversation before you're in it.
Anyone who wants to start at depth. The ramp matters more here than in nearly anything else, and the ramp is not a formality.

The Four Rules of the Current

These don't bend for experience.

Nothing crosses the chest. Keep the whole circuit below the waist. If you're playing above the waist at all, the current stays confined within a single limb and never crosses the torso. One electrode on the left and one on the right with a heart in between is how people get seriously hurt.
Nothing near the head, neck, or throat. Ever.
Power to zero before you connect, disconnect, or change anything. Attach at zero, ramp up from zero, come back to zero before you touch a connection. Never adjust a live circuit that's in the middle of being made or broken.
The current takes the path it takes, not the path you planned. Wet skin, lube, sweat, fluid, and penetration all change conductivity mid-scene. Your intended path and your actual path are two different things and the gap between them is where injuries live.

Gear

Purpose-built beats repurposed. Units made for erotic e-stim — Erostek, E-Stim Systems, Folsom and similar — are designed for this, with isolated outputs and current limits appropriate to genital use. They cost more for a reason.

On TENS units, honestly: plenty of experienced people use them, and they're not automatically unsafe. The real risks are cheap unregulated units from marketplace sellers, using them internally or genitally when they weren't designed for it, and units with no isolation between channels. If you're using one, know which of those applies to yours.

Non-negotiables:

Battery-powered only. Nothing that plugs into mains power. Nothing DIY, nothing modified, nothing from a kit.
One unit per body. Two units on one person creates paths nobody planned.
Conductive gel or water-based lube at every contact point. Silicone lube does not conduct. Dry contact creates hot spots, which is a burn in progress.
Larger contact area is safer than smaller. Current density is the thing that burns.
Insertables need a flared base and need to be designed for current. A metal object with no retrieval base is a trip to the ER twice over.
Adhesive pads are single-user. They sit on skin and pick up fluid. Nobody's sharing them.

If sensation suddenly turns sharp, stingy, or pinpoint, the pad has dried out or shifted. That is not a cue to turn the power up — it's a cue to stop, come to zero, and re-gel.

Violet wands are a different animal. High voltage, very low current, surface only — a different risk profile, not a milder one. They produce ozone, they carry a real fire risk near alcohol, and they should be nowhere near flammable lubes, hand sanitizer, or anything alcohol-based. The implant contraindication applies identically.

Negotiating It

Run your usual frame — 📝ANCHORS or whatever your scene uses — and know that the H domain is doing heavier lifting than usual here. The health question isn't a formality; four of the answers are disqualifying.

Ask, plainly, before anything is attached: implants, heart, seizures, pregnancy, piercings, IUD, skin conditions, nerve or sensation issues, and what they've had to drink or take. If someone is vague, that's a no — not because they're being evasive, but because you can't run this on a guess.

Then negotiate the things specific to electro:

What it will feel like, which is genuinely hard to describe and worth a low-power demo on a thigh before anything else happens.
That intensity doesn't scale linearly — small dial movements can produce large jumps, especially as conductivity changes.
Involuntary muscle contraction. People's hands clench, jaws tighten, bodies jerk. This is normal and it needs to be expected rather than discovered.
Bondage plus electro, if that's on the table: someone who can't move away from a sensation needs a faster release than usual. Quick-release everything.

Running It

Attach at zero. Ramp slowly. Hand stays on the dial.
Check in more often than feels necessary, especially in the first ten minutes.
Check the skin under the electrodes every fifteen or twenty minutes. Redness is information.
Never leave someone attached and unattended. Not to get water, not for a minute.
Watch duration. Muscles fatigue, and next-day soreness is real. This is not a two-hour-at-intensity activity.
If you're sharing a circuit across two bodies — only with a unit designed for it, only with both people cleared of every contraindication above, and only with the entire loop staying below the waist for both of them.

Stopping

The piece people miss, and the most important paragraph in this memo: a safeword that requires gripping or speaking can fail. Muscle contraction locks hands and clenches jaws. A squeeze signal is exactly the signal that stops working at the moment you need it.

Agree instead on something that works while contracted — an object held loosely that falls when the hand opens or closes wrong, a sound rather than a word, a gross motor movement like turning the head. And the top's hand is on the dial the whole time, because the fastest stop available is always the top's.

To stop: power to zero first, then remove electrodes. Never yank a live connection.

Penetrative and Conductive Play

This is where electro stops being a station activity and becomes something that needs room.

Once there's penetration, fluid, and two bodies in contact, the body is one conductor. Lube pools, positions change, and contact points you didn't plan for open and close throughout. The circuit you set up at the start is not the circuit you have twenty minutes in — and sensation can jump without anyone touching the dial.

What that means practically:

Everyone in the circuit clears every contraindication. Not just the person wearing electrodes — anyone whose skin is in contact with them.
The whole loop stays below the waist for every body in it. With two people this takes actual thought, because a hand on a chest can complete a path you didn't intend.
Internal electrodes should be bipolar — the circuit closing inside the toy itself rather than traveling through the body to find a return.
Nitrile gloves insulate. That's useful: a gloved hand stays out of the circuit.
Barriers block conduction. A condom over an electrode stops it working; plan for cleaning instead of covering.
More space, more time, fewer people. Room to reposition without hitting a wall or a stranger, time to go slowly, and a top whose attention isn't split.

Logan and I do this at smaller and private events rather than at a busy party, and the reason is logistical before it's anything else. It needs floor space, it needs an unhurried setup, and it needs me not managing a room while I'm doing it. A corner of a crowded dungeon is the wrong container for it, not because of modesty but because the margin for adjustment isn't there.

We reset to zero and re-check the path any time we change position — every time, not when it feels warranted. It's the single habit that's kept this fun instead of alarming, because the change we'd have missed is exactly the one that arrives without warning.

After

Check the skin everywhere an electrode sat, before anything else.
Hydrate, and eat something with salt and protein. Muscles did involuntary work for however long that was.
Expect soreness the next day, sometimes in places that weren't the point.
Sensation echoes. Tingling, a lingering buzz, a phantom sense of the current for a while afterward. Normal.
Drop can arrive late, same as any intense scene. Feelings a day or two out don't mean anything went wrong.

At a Party

If you're hosting electro rather than doing it, this is a station, not a general-room activity. From the host memo:

A named operator who owns the gear and runs it themselves — not someone lending equipment to strangers.
Contraindications posted, so people can exclude themselves without disclosing anything.
No impaired play, enforced, not suggested.
Do not touch anyone who is in circuit without asking — including the top. Touching them puts you in it. This needs to be said out loud, because it's the one rule nobody's intuition supplies.

And if you're attending: the house's rules and the operator's limits win over anything in this memo.

The Short Version

Implants, pregnancy, seizures, heart conditions — absolute no
Piercings, IUDs, neuropathy, broken skin, substances — caution or no
Below the waist, or within a single limb. Never across the chest
Nothing near the head, neck, or throat
Zero the power before connecting, disconnecting, or changing anything
Battery-powered, purpose-built, one unit per body
Conductive gel or water-based lube at every contact point, always
Sharp or pinpoint sensation means re-gel, not turn up
A squeeze safeword fails under contraction — pick one that doesn't
Check skin under the electrodes every fifteen minutes
Never leave anyone attached and unattended
Wet and penetrative play makes the body one conductor — re-check the path every time anything moves

What This Doesn't Cover

The specifics of any one unit — read the manual, they differ meaningfully. Advanced waveform and multi-channel work, which wants instruction from someone doing it in front of you rather than a memo. And medical electrostimulation, which is an entirely different practice with different equipment and isn't what this is.