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Content
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| Quality : |
18.0 / 20 |
| Quantity : |
12.5 / 15 |
| Entertain : |
13.0 / 15 |
| Updates : |
9.5 / 10 |
| Exclusive : |
5.0 / 05 |
| Download : |
3.5 / 05 |
| sub-total : |
61.5 / 70 |
| Navigation |
| Easy : |
8.5 / 10 |
| Features : |
3.5 / 05 |
| Design : |
3.0 / 05 |
| sub-total : |
15.0 / 20 |
| Other |
| Originality : |
3.5 / 05 |
| Hard Facts : |
3.5 / 05 |
| sub-total : |
7.0 / 10 |
Scoring Criteria New
New Update!
As of Aug 15th, 07, price of a site is no longer factored into the overall score/rank. |
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1. Daily updates.
2. Zip file option for downloading images.
3. Great quality content.
4. Exclusive glamour/bondage content.
1. Very softcore for bondage/fetish content.
2. Additional content in store comes at an extra cost.
"A glamour photography site with some bondage & fetish flare to it." |
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RestrainedElegance.com is where bondage meets glamour, with over 12,300+ images and 35+ video shoots from the fetish photography of Hywel Phillips. Members are promised daily updates and a new video every Wednesday. The images are full-screen quality and the site specializes in "stringent barefoot bondage", with "world-famous bondage models plus glamour and fashion models who discovered their submissive nature on Restrained Elegance". To join will cost a somewhat expensive $29.95, but that drops down to a more reasonable monthly price of $22.95.
First thing you see once inside is a "Latest News" blog written by Hywel himself. It looks like he writes here about 2 times per month but the Member's Index shows that updates do indeed take place daily and sometimes there are even multiple updates to check out. They also offer a section titled Archive, where you'll find things like screensavers and a couple of the models' image content broken down into parts. There is no model index here, however, and I think that is what's really missing from this site. Especially considering they advertise famous models here like Jasmine Sinclair, Chanta Rose, Belle, Petra Morgan and more. Interestingly enough you can find photosets of these models listed by name in the tour, which then takes you to the photostore where the content can be purchased separately at about $4.50 per zip file. What's even more interesting is that these paid photosets are not offered in the member's area either, although a few other sets are.
The Members' Index is probably where you'll want to start on this site and lists the photo & videos in date order all on one page along with a preview image, short description and link to a zip file for the set. Videos are offered as downloads in Real Media or Windows Media Player and stream as high as 800k (WMV). The image sets are great quality images and are 1024x682 pixels in size. There is a nice variety of bondage and fetish content here, with things like hair pulling, latex outfits, gagging and screaming, submission, nipple clamps, interrogations complete with cop outfits, kidnappings, tickling, torture, nurses, and plenty more, all done with a much higher touch of elegance and class than what is the norm for most fetish content. Not that there isn't the frequent touches of dungeons and darkness, leather, whips, chains and spikes, but it's all done with an extra sense of artistic and dramatic high-quality style. While it may not be for every lover of fetish pornography, I certainly enjoyed the mix of glamour and fetish content here. The models are extremely attractive and you'll find a nice range of photographic style, however, true to glamour photography, even though the content here focuses on acts of bondage and other fetishes, the content itself is rather tame for a fetish site.
The 35+ videos are great quality and very well done, usually featuring the model dressed up in stockings and lace, latex or nude being told what to do or tickled, tied up, tortured, gagged or whatever else they can dream up. They're still on the softer side of bondage and fetish porn as you won’t see any insertions or even pussy shots and that goes for all of the content here, actually. Overall Restrained Elegance is a nice site for exclusive, high-quality bondage & fetish glamour content that is by no means extreme but rather more imaginative and artistic featuring gorgeous models and a great variety of set-ups. There's an active members forum to check out and quite a few image sets and videos available for purchase that aren't featured in the member’s area. At the price of admission, I'd rather they do away with the photo and video store and just make the content available for member's and hopefully that's something they might consider here. The navigation isn't anything advanced and could stand to be improved but I enjoyed the site nonetheless as a nice break from the norm of adult Internet sites.
| 1st Follow-Up Review |
Review: 08-21-06 |
I'm still a big fan of Restrained Elegance's high quality approach to barefoot/fetish porn. I'm not sure if I mentioned this last time or not, but updates do come in daily, although since the content is rotated out, the actual numbers here will always stay about the same. I can't say it's a business model that I fully understand or support (I love me some growing archives), but at least they've greatly reduced their monthly recurring price (in reflection of that?). In any case, it looks as though there have been some improvements made to the design of things here. I'm still a little turned off by the lack of preview thumbs for the model index. The video index is a better basis of how things should look, but overall it was nice to see that they've kept a good amount of site personality in tact while trying to spruce things up a bit. I think my bottom line will stay the same this time around, but Restrained Elegance is still a nice change of pace from the “norm” of "glamour" photography &/or fetish sites.
Score decreased from 81.7 to 81.0.
| 2nd Follow-Up Review |
Review: 02-04-08 |
In the last 6 months or so quite a few changes have been made to the Restrained Elegance member's area, which now contains more than 22,180+ images and 61+ videos; an increase from last time for sure. First off, they now offer a member's chat with special guest models. So far they've only completed their first chat, but it looks like two more are already scheduled in the works and you can read a full transcript if for some reason you weren't able to participate. But in even better news, Restrained Elegance has made getting around the member's area a whole lot easier by the addition of a keyword search feature and a model index - awesome! Some additional model/bio information completes the deal for some of the models, and overall this is just some very exciting news. Seeing as they made the call to raise the price some (noticed on our last visit) these are some very welcome changes and should increase their overall score a little bit. It's nice to see a quality fetish site working hard to continue raising the bar.
Score increased from 81.0 to 83.5.
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