Just a few doors down Bergen Street from Brooklyn's venerable Pintchik's Hardware, a very different kind of hardware store has just opened for business.

The new Park Slope outpost of Babeland is the sex toy retailer's first New York City venture beyond its two Manhattan stores in Soho and the Lower East Side. (The company also has stores in Seattle, and online.) 

And to judge from the steady stream of Slopers that came out for the store's grand opening party (staffers hamming it up, right), it's going to be a huge success. 

A live DJ provided the beats as customers sipped wine and snacked on mini cupcakes -- red velvet, natch, courtesy of the Slope's own Ladybird Bakery.  They avidly browsed and bought the latest in dildos, vibrators, bondage toys and more, all displayed on glass-and-chrome shelving, more along the sleekly shiny lines of an Apple Store rather than the kinda skeevy curtained back room at Ricky's. 

I'm guessing that environmental concerns were probably not in the forefront of these shoppers' thoughts.  But according to Babeland co-owner and Brooklynite Claire Cavanaugh, who was zipping agilely from handing out balloons in front of the store to welcoming customers and wrangling staff inside, greening our erotic choices has never been easier. 

Comparing the silicone and elastomer-heavy selection I saw on Sunday to what was on Babeland's shelves when I first reported on toxics in sex toys in 2005, she seems to be right.

 "The eco-awareness of vendors has exploded, especially in regards to phthalates" in the past few years, she told me. "They're realizing that the educated customer doesn't want them."  Phthalates are a family of chemicals strongly implicated as endocrine disruptors -- substances that mimic hormones in the body, potentially impairing fertility and reproductive development.  Among their many uses in common products, phthalates are added as a plasticizer to vinyl (polyvinyl chloride or PVC, itself quite polluting during both manufacture and disposal), which for years has been a common material for soft sex toys.

Along with the new abundance of phthalate-free options, I noticed more rechargeable toys on the shelves.  Since disposable batteries typically contain heavy metals like cadmium, lead, nickel, and mercury, which can contaminate soil and water if they end up in landfills not equipped to deal with hazardous waste, batteries have likely accounted for a significant percentage of the post-consumer pollution attributable to sex toys.

Today's greened-up vibrators and dildos often come in sculptural modern shapes instead of the pinky-brown penis representations of old; think Jeff Koons, not John Holmes.  To demonstrate, Cavanaugh showed me the "Delight," a cheerily s-curved vibrator made of silicone and hard plastic -- both phthalate-free materials -- fashioned in cleverly race-neutral colors like blue and violet.  When not in use, you can pop it into a discrete carrying case-cum-recharger. 

It's a measure of how big green retail has become in the past few years that Babeland now offers an "Eco-Delight Kit."  It features the Delight and "Naked," a lubricant the company had developed specifically to be "vegan, petro-free, paraben-free and cruelty-free," as well as slippery and delicious-tasting, Cavanaugh told me. (I couldn't confirm this at the party -- Naked has proven so popular that it's on backorder -- but the customer reviews at Babeland's web store are five by five.)

Babeland continues to carry some vinyl toys, as they're generally more easily affordable than silicone toys; the Delight, with its "32 different vibration options," is near the high end at $165.  The store gives out a free condom with each purchase of a toy that contains phthalates, Cavanaugh said. 

As for as other facets of greening a business, the Brooklyn shop's signature Babeland wall colors of vibrant pink and blue were achieved with Aura, Benjamin Moore's line of low-VOC paints.  Countertops are made of polished grey Icestone, a material locally manufactured from recycled concrete and glass. And motion sensors have been incorporated into the lighting for the employee-only basement area.  Said Cavanaugh, "I'd love to make this company have a really small footprint." 

Where:

Babeland
462 Bergen Street (between Flatbush and 5th avenues)
718-638-3820