Question:
Does lube affect sperm and male fertility?
Answer:
There are lots of people who use some kind of lubricant during sex, and lots of different lubricants for them to choose from. In addition to all the ‘personal lubricant’ products on the shelves of supermarkets and pharmacies, other commonly used lubricants include different types of oils (including edible vegetable oils or mineral oil, which is what’s in baby oil or massage oil), saliva or even egg white.
There are a lot of scientific studies showing negative effects on sperm of ‘personal lubricant’ products, vegetable oils and saliva (some ‘personal lubricant’ products and egg white seem not to have an effect). The problem with these studies, though, is that they are done by mixing sperm samples with lubricants in plastic dishes in laboratories. That’s not actually how lubricants are used!
More relevant scientific studies measure the time it takes to get pregnant, or the pregnancy rates, for couples who do or do not use lubricant when they have sex. These studies conclude that there is no effect of using lubricant.
So, although the laboratory studies show that many lubricants can affect sperm, in practicality they don’t affect couples’ ability to get pregnant.
Tim Moss
Healthy Male Health Content Manager
Associate Professor Tim Moss has PhD in physiology and more than 20 years’ experience as a biomedical research scientist. Tim stepped away from his successful academic career at the end of 2019, to apply his skills in turning complicated scientific and medical knowledge into information that all people can use to improve their health and wellbeing. Tim has written for crikey.com and Scientific American’s Observations blog, which is far more interesting than his authorship of over 150 academic publications. He has studied science communication at the Alan Alda Centre for Communicating Science in New York, and at the Department of Biological Engineering Communication Lab at MIT in Boston.
