Restrained Elegance

Finding your way around the site is as easy as can be. It seems they opted for a real minimalistic, user-friendly approach. Not the best looking I've seen, but it does get the job done. The setup is pretty straight-forward: The main menu contains only the bare necessities, and more fine-tuned browsing can be done with aid of the advanced search function which allows content to be filtered by model, media type, and a list of over 60 bondage-related keywords. One minor complaint would be that browsing the photos exclusively might be confusing at first. There's a direct video link in the menu, but none for photo galleries. But really, the whole setup is a little too simple for my tastes. But when it comes down to it, accessing the content is a real no brainer. And believe you me, I dived in head first.

If the sight of a helpless woman arouses you as much as it does me, you'll like what you see at Restrained Elegance . The scenes contain a variety of suspensions, verbal abuse, and general humiliation, happily dished out by what seems to be an endless supply of ill tempered Doms. I particularly enjoyed the hogtied scenes. There's nothing sexier than a damsel in distress, and the methods of suspension and the elaborate knots employed to keep these beauties captive certainly add to the appeal. And you can tell they really put a lot of effort to make sure that not only are they properly restrained but also as uncomfortable as humanly possible. True, they don't go to the extremes of some other sites, particularly when it comes to the torture route, but I'd still rate a lot of these scenes above the middle of the road type bondage.

Of course, all those ropes and medieval looking devices would be worthless without willing participants. So far they've managed to round up over 150 gluttons for punishment, and I was happy that I didn't recognize the majority of them. Either way, they're a classy looking bunch of gals, and they even threw in a plain jane or two just to keep things real. My only complaint would be that their model index is, well, a little lacking. Other than links and statistics on sets/videos she's been in, there's really no other information provided whatsoever. I think they should at least put up bios. Especially with such a high calibre of subbies.

Just as with the expansion of video formats and their quality, there's also been quite a few improvements made to the scenes throughout the the course of the last several years. The older scenes had a much rougher, home-movie feel about them. And while there are still many scenes that follow the old formula of a girl bound and ready whilst their master is nearby, still others have incorporated more more elaborate plots and exotic set pieces, adding in a fantasy element that really fits quite well with their main theme. The general execution, at least in the number of scenes I sampled, was done quite well. All too often I'll see obvious fake moans of pain or unnatural and ill timed flinches. Here, however, most of the fear and discomfort came across as quite genuine. Let's hope it was.

A ward of warning, though: don't go into this expecting penetration and dick sucking. You'll see plenty of nude girls, and there will be varying degrees of torture — a good amount to the soles of their feet, much to my delight — but no actual acts are involved. To me, the scenes are plenty hot enough without it, but I know some of you have very specific tastes, so I thought I'd throw that out there.

The newer batch of videos can be downloaded in multiple Windows Media and MPEG-4 files in stunning High-Definition quality, a stark contrast with the older videos which sometimes only offered one format and a poor resolution with the play-back quality to match. Yep, things have came a long way around here since 2007. The only thing they're really missing — aside from a mobile-format, perhaps — is surprisingly common place these days: streaming video. I mean, if I had to have one or the other, I'd pick downloads all day long. But a lack of being able to stream the scenes is going to disappoint a lot of people. And taking into consideration the size of some of these files, an embedded option might not be a bad idea. In their defense, though, download speeds here were extremely fast, averaging around 1.4 megs-per-second.

The gallery share the similar setup that can be seen throughout the rest of the site. They went for the more standard, row of thumbnails route, with additional links to download the full gallery compressed in a ZIP. There were 0 photo galleries altogether, with an average of 150 good looking JPEGs each. The resolution was nice, though it could have been bigger, but the images were clear and crisp and the watermark, which usually annoys the piss out of me, wasn't so bad here.

They're also well lit and shot, and have that magazine quality(minus the inhuman airbrushing). What really caught my eye, though, was the extremely in-depth descriptions and story-lines attached to each gallery. It added a little something extra that made the whole viewing experience hotter. It's certainly more interesting than a slide-show, I'll give them that.

There's not really a whole lot in the way of bonus content provided here. But the site does have a nice sense of community and a certain level of member activity. The site has its own forum, with over 1,000 topics and, last I checked, 45 users lurking. In addition to a section with polls and site suggestions, there was an off-topic/miscellaneous sub-forum with all sorts of perverted talk, and, from what I could see, some level of staff interaction, also.