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When a friend told Max Huhn that he didn’t think he could attract an audience on OnlyFans because he had retrograde ejaculation, the former British police officer said he could fake his friend’s cum shots.
It was 2015, and Huhn got to work on fake semen in his Orlando basement, mixing white conditioner and hand lotion from Walgreens. That first batch didn’t work—the conditioner stung and the lotion wasn’t realistic—but Huhn tinkered on perfecting his fake-semen recipe with cornstarch, lube and time. He spent a year working on his own methylcellulose formula in buckets until he hit a goldilocks-like sweet spot: Not too salty, sticky, or goopy.
“The funny thing is that my friend moved back to Texas. I never saw him again,” says Huhn, 59. “I’m thinking, ‘Well, I just wasted a year of my life on this.’”
He was wrong. After he created a website in 2016, in hope of offloading some of the synthetic semen, another friend suggested he sell the fake semen on Amazon. Sales skyrocketed, thanks, in large part, to “average everyday folk who have got some kind of a cum fetish,” he says. Now, he sells about $150,000 a year of the fake cum at his company, Money Shot Magic, he says, and has emerged as one of the many players in what’s become a growing marketplace.
“I’m thinking, ‘I’m making more money doing this than on my real-estate business,’” Huhn says.
Synthetic semen is having a moment. It stars in OnlyFans videos, squirts out of fantastical dildos and is available in three different varieties at Walmart.com. The so-called ‘creampie’ scenes—where copious amounts of cum drip out of the vagina or anus—are increasing in popularity on porn sites. “Cream pie” was the seventh-most searched for term on Pornhub worldwide in 2025. On FetLife, a fetish social-media site, more than 540,000 users listed “cum” as their fetish. Fake-cum porn videos catering to viewers with a synthetic semen fetish garner millions of views on Pornhub and XNXX.
Semen has been on people’s minds in the bedroom for a while. Dr. Justin J. Lehmiller, a senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, pointed to his 2018 survey that found that of the more than 4,000 American adults polled, “79 percent of men and 65.5 percent of women says that they have had fantasies in which semen plays a central role (e.g., bukkake, creampie, facials, etc.).”
“This isn’t to say that three-quarters of men and two-thirds of women have a semen fetish; rather, it’s just to say that it is very common for people to eroticize this body fluid,” Lehmiller wrote in an email. “And, in light of that, it’s not surprising that there’s a whole industry built around synthetic semen.”
As the cultural appetite for semen-heavy pornography rises, and the number of people participating in the pornography industry continues to surge on platforms like OnlyFans, sex accessory sellers are finally catching on. Artificial semen companies have gone from supplying the porn industry to selling to cum fetishists and normies. The top three cum lube brands on Amazon—Xesso, LubeLife and Super Silk—have sold a combined 213,000-plus bottles, according to data listed on Amazon. That so many companies are making semen lube is evidence of how the demand to simulate large loads extends beyond the porn industry and into average couples’ bedrooms.
“We’ve had to manufacture this substance that has no biological function whatsoever because it has such massive cultural meaning,” says Lisa Jean Moore, a sociology professor at SUNY Purchase and the author of Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious Fluid.
Fake cum started being used in the 1970s partly because the porn industry demanded it. The money shot—the moment in an adult movie when a man ejaculates in some visible fashion, usually on a person’s stomach, face or breasts— gained popularity in the 1972 film Deep Throat and other productions during the golden age of porn. It served as proof that the performer had an orgasm, or as a stand-in for women’s sexual pleasure, film studies scholar Linda Williams has argued. But not all performers could provide their money shots on demand, as Steven Ziplow wrote in Film Maker’s Guide to Pornography in 1977. And at a time when commercial fake cum didn’t exist, something had to take its place, says porn historian David French.
“There were a variety of common recipes used back then, from thinned-out hand lotion to egg whites,” French says.
Annie Sprinkle, 72, a golden-age porn star who is now an artist who lives in San Francisco, recalled that 1980s porn director Leonard Kirtman used “a mixture of egg whites, sugar and condensed milk.” Sprinkle says the substance was squirted though a makeshift “cum machine,” which was a little enema bulb with a tube.
“Guys could hold the tube under the head of the cock,” she says.
Veronica Hart, a 1980s-era porn star turned director and sex educator, recalled using Cetaphil. Though some shoestring productions and cam girls still use Cetaphil or coconut cream as stand-in cum, there are now at least 16 businesses making fake cum or cum lube, both scented and unscented.
Siouxsie Q, a director and performer with her own production company Pig Machine whose work streams on Adult Time, uses a lot of fake cum due to the outsized role it plays in over-the-top scenes now common in modern pornography, such as “the girl getting the jizz on her glasses, or the step bro dodging a cum shot.” Fake cum can also provide continuity while filming.
“After the [real] cum shot happens, there’s maybe some ending dialogue that we need to get, but in order for our actors to remember that dialogue, they need to have a sip of water,” she says.
But making fake jizz isn’t cheap. Since lubricant goes inside orifices, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration considers it a Class 2 medical device. Therefore, the lube must be FDA 501K certified, which is a multi-year process that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per product for testing facilities and chemists. It is technically illegal to sell a lubricant without 510K certification, but “the FDA probably doesn’t have the personnel to police this,” says Kanica Chum, director of sales administration for CC Wellness, the parent company of LubeLife that makes 510K certified Jizzy Juice at their facility in Valencia, Calif.
“It’s reassuring to know that when you’re using an FDA 510K-certified product, that at least there’s some regulation and some oversight,” Chum says, “because…if there’s an irritant in there that you’re allergic to, you end up in a hospital.”
Sales were initially slow for Max Huhn, but one of his customers gave him some good feedback that changed everything: You need a delivery mechanism for the fake cum.
Huhn went underneath his kitchen sink to find spray bottles that he could use to shoot out the cum. The solution was too thick to move through the mechanism, so he bought heavy-duty trigger sprayers and connected them to 50-inch-long tubes, which were long enough that the operator on the other end wouldn’t be visible in a porn scene.
Despite the success, Money Shot Magic is not 510K certified by the FDA, which means he can’t legally sell his product as a lube.
“It could be, if I had $100,000 to throw at the FDA just to let them tell me it’s fine,” Huhn says. “But I know it’s fine. I’ve been making it for a decade, and it’s got all the right preservatives.”
Though Huhn has no plans to get certified anytime soon, he’s recently partnered with a factory to manufacture the synthetic jizz. His goal? To eventually compete with the big players in the fake-cum space.
“I want the adult industry to be able to say, ‘Well, if you’re going to use one, use this one,’” he says.