Sexual Wellness Company Vella Bioscience Introduces An Anatomically Correct NFT

For the launch of Women’s Pleasure Serum, a topical serum designed to promote frequent and satisfying orgasms, Vella Bioscience believed it needed anatomically correct images to explain how the product works by conveying the physiological change that occurs when the clitoris and vagina become aroused.

Vella’s founding team, including Harin Padma-Nathan, an expert on sexual function and lead investigator for Viagra and Cialis, couldn’t find correct images and realized they didn’t exist, though comparable ones for the penile smooth muscle do exist. “We scoured the entire internet library, textbooks, and could not find a single thing,” says Nial DeMena, CEO of Vella. “That’s what caused us to commission the drawings.”

Vella commissioned a medical illustrator to create a drawing it couldn’t find under the direction of Padma-Nathan and Nicole Prause, a neuroscientist and the founder of Liberos, an orgasm research lab. “To the best of our knowledge, the drawing is the first to show the vagina in a state of arousal—the engorgement, lubrication and vaginal elongation that occur,” says Vella COO Carolyn Wheeler. In 2019, three versions of the illustration were made in white, brown and Black skin tones. 

Since the origin of the illustration, Vella wanted to commemorate it to celebrate its historical significance. As the popularity of non-fungible tokens or NFTs exploded over the past year, DeMena decided an NFT would be a great vehicle to showcase the drawing while also spotlighting the importance of female arousal and pleasure, historically stigmatized topics that are heavily censored across the digital landscape. Even the artist who created Vella’s first-of-its-kind illustration has asked to remain confidential due to the nature of the work and fear of professional repercussions. 

Vella had the original artwork enhanced and digitized. Dubbed For Every V, its artwork collection is available starting today at foreveryv.art. Floor prices or opening bids are estimated at 1 ethereum or ETH, a popular cryptocurrency, an amount that equates to roughly $2,465.80 at the current exchange rate. The auction will be open for a month. As is customary with most NFT projects, the brand will have a private Discord server for Vella’s NFT community. 

In creating its NFT, Vella was inspired by Nigerian medical student and illustrator Chidiebere Ibe’s illustration of a Black fetus in utero which went viral, igniting a global conversation about the lack of diversity, including racial and anatomical diversity, in medical educational materials. In December, Ibe auctioned the illustration as an NFT for 10 ethereum or about $38,000 based on the exchange rate at the time. 

DeMena says proceeds from the auction of Vella’s NFT will be spent accordingly: 20% will go toward future NFT projects; 20% will go toward buying other NFTs; 20% will go toward charities like RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network); and 40% will go  toward covering the NFT project and developing new Vella products. In addition to the NFT auction winners, image rights for the illustration will be granted to academic or clinical institutions for use in textbooks free of charge. 

“The goal is to continue to fund NFT projects, find new products centered around female pleasure, push money into charitable causes and, finally, become holders of NFTs ourselves and support the larger communities’ fantastic work like Women Rise, World of Women, Women with Weapons, Crypto Chicks, Alpha Girl Club, BFF,” says DeMena.

He hopes Vella’s NFT project will get young girls and women excited about Web3 and crypto. Despite the popularity of women-led initiatives like the aforementioned ones named by DeMena—Jaime Schmidt, founder of Schmidt’s Naturals, is a co-founder of BFF, for instance—Web3 is a very male-dominated space. Art auction house Christie’s estimates only 16% of NFT artists are women and sales of their work have accounted for just 5% of the multibillion-dollar industry’s sales.

For companies in the sexual wellness segment like Vella, Web3 offers a respite from the pervasive censorship by Web 2.0 players like Google, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. “On Web3, which is where NFTs live, we are unencumbered by the influence of giant tech companies and can publish our educational materials freely,” says Wheeler. “That, coupled with the movement of women entering the NFT space to dominate or at least equalize the playing field of those who will reap the economic benefits of the burgeoning industry, it feels like perhaps the safest place on the internet to be a sexual wellness brand on the internet right now. We don’t have to diminish our message that women also have a right to sexual pleasure, to understanding their bodies, to improving their conditions, just to pass an inane, misogynistic algorithm.”