The major standout feature of AdultFriendFinder isn’t their millions of users or their free-wheeling stance on nudity, nor is it their massive, searchable database of kinks. What truly sets them apart, in fact, is their Live Action tab, where AFF users can communicate in real-time across webcams and chat rooms.

In this area of the site, accessible to both paying and non-paying members, users can communicate in real-time via both text and video, and things definitely get wild. Here are the four main sections of the Live Action tab, and what you need to know about them:

Member Webcams

The first of four sub-tabs, Member Webcams is the place AFF users go to let loose on camera, for an audience. The camera feeds appear in a grid format, organized in order of viewer count, and as with the on-site dating profiles, you’ll be able to see, at a glance, who has a verified account or who is a paying member. Other details visible immediately include the model’s age, gender and location.

If you can’t find what you’re looking for right away, you can start to apply filters: Men, Women, Couples, Trans, as well as Nude or Non-Nude. You can even use the Sort By button to arrange the models in order of their proximity to you.

Best of all? This entire section of the website is accessible to free accounts, although if you want to actually interact with the models, either via public-facing comments or by sending gifts or emoji reactions, you will need to upgrade your account.

And pro tip: if you come across a particularly attractive model or manage to have a good conversation with someone, click the Star icon in the upper right-hand corner of the webcam feed to Favorite them, which will make it easier to find their feed when they next come online. 

Pro Models

The Pro Models section resembles a bigger-budget version of the Member Webcams area, except instead of camming for the love of the experience or to make new connections, the Pro models are explicitly there to make a bug. 

Free users are able to view these cams, but if you want to chat, tip or engage a model in a private, one-on-one cam session, you’ll need to pull out your credit card. 

To our mind, this is the least interesting part of the AFF Live Action experience, and the most transactional. Their Pro Models section doesn’t offer anything that competing adult webcam sites don’t, and most of the competition offers more models and a better interface.

Chat Rooms

If you’re not necessarily looking for visual stimulation but happy to use your words to titillate, check out the Chat Rooms area. Here, you can enter into chat rooms based around specific interests and topics, or look to join a regional chat room based in your country or state. 

While words, stories, and shared experiences form the basis of this section, people often do also share photos. Best of all, there are very few restrictions on non-paying members in these areas, so you can build a following or interact with other people without having to create a paid subscription. 

Activity Feed

The Activity Feed is the fastest way to catch up on what’s trending on the site, usually populated by new images and videos uploaded by members. The default view is Global, showing you the hottest content from members across the world, but you can also sort by Near You to find more local posts, or even restrict the list to your Friends & Hotlist, helping you keep up with what your mutual friends or followers are doing on the site. 

Open-ear earbuds sit on the exterior of the ear, but they also come in many shapes and sizes, from clip models to ear hook models. Some are specifically designed for working out, while others are better for everyday use. The Bose Ultra Open earbuds are an especially popular pick, thanks to their sound quality and color options, but at $299, they’re hardly the most affordable option.

Plus, since the Bose Ultra Open came out in 2024, big audio brands like Sony have released open earbuds of their own, while Shokz has introduced noise reduction into the category for the first time. To help you find the best open earbud models available in 2026, we tested the latest options from Soundcore, Sony, Shokz, Bose, and more.

What are open earbuds?

Open earbuds let you get as close as possible to the feeling of not wearing earbuds at all. Unlike in-ear earbuds, which sit in your ear canal, open earbuds sit just outside your ears (as the name would suggest). Some models hold the speaker component in place with an ear hook, while others opt for an ear cuff.

People generally opt for open earbuds for three main reasons:

1. They provide a private listening experience while leaving you almost completely aware of your surroundings. It’s like the best transparency mode you’ve ever used.

2. For some people, not having an earbud physically in their ear is generally more comfortable.

3. The hooks and cuffs (along with general awareness of your surroundings) make them a great option for keeping you in place and alert while you’re working out, working, or simply existing in the world.

What are the drawbacks of open earbuds?

As you may have gathered from the section above, open earbuds don’t come with active noise cancellation. That’s mostly thanks to how much sound they let in (by design) and the difficulty of cancelling out sound without having the device covering your actual ear canal.

Also, thanks to the whole open ear-canal situation, these aren’t going to be the earbuds for audiophiles. That’s not to say open earbuds sound bad — if you’ve never tried them, we promise they sound much better than you’re imagining — but you will lose out on some of the nuance of a song without having the earbud actually in your ear.

That said, many pairs still have equalizers on their companion apps to help you make them sound their best. Our best picks for sound, the Bose Ultra Open earbuds and Shokz OpenFit Pro earbuds, even have spatial audio features that work surprisingly well.

Most open earbuds will also boast some form of special technology that keeps them from leaking too much sound. While these pairs do pretty well in keeping the sound just to you, most pairs (including our picks) will be prone to some leakage, especially at higher volumes.

Finally, some open earbuds — mainly those with ear hooks — tend to have slightly bulkier cases. If you like to travel especially light, it’s something to keep in mind.

How to wear open-ear earbuds

Open-ear earbuds come in three major styles: cuff, ear hook, and bone conduction. How you wear them depends entirely on which style you have. Cuff earbuds “clip” onto the ear, not unlike a piece of jewelry, generally around the area right above the earlobe. Ear hook earbuds have a hook situated around the back of your ear and a speaker component situated right over your ear canal. Finally, bone conduction earbuds sit right behind the ears, with a band that goes around the back of the head to hold them in place.

Regardless of the style, its important to adjust the exact positioning of your open earbuds to see which offers the best sound, especially as the wrong positioning can deteriorate the quality.

For a visual representation of what wearing a cuff-style earbud looks like, you can check out our open earbuds explainer.

What about bone conduction headphones?

Bone conduction earbuds work exactly like the name implies they do — they use your skull to conduct sound waves, instead of projecting the sound into your ear, like most of the picks are on list. Typically, a band runs from either side of the users head to help hold the headphones in place.

Shokz, the brand behind our top pick, is a popular maker of these kinds of headphones. While we do consider them open earbuds, we have yet to test any bone conduction earbuds — look out in the future for that update. On that note:

What’s next in our testing pipeline

The open earbuds market is rapidly expanding, so we’ll be testing more as we can get our hands on them. We recently added the Sony LinkBuds Clip and Soundcore AeroFit 2 Pro to this guide.

In addition to the earbuds that made our initial guide in May 2025, we tested out the Nothing Ear (Open) earbuds ($149), the Sony Linkbuds Open ($199.99), the Anker Soundcore AeroClip earbuds ($169.99), and the Shokz OpenFit Air ($119.95). While none of the above were bad earbuds by any means, we found our picks to outshine them in their comfort and sound quality, especially when considering their respective prices.

Read our full review of Tinder Platinum.

While some women have found relationships on Tinder, that’s usually not why I recommend it. Even as Tinder tries to shed its hookup app reputation, it’s still my go-to choice for casual dating. It has a massive user base, especially among younger people — the SSRS survey found that 73 percent of online daters aged 18-29 have used Tinder.

It’s the app I suggest having in your back pocket if you’re looking for anything more casual than a serious relationship, whether that’s a one-night stand or just an impromptu date while traveling. Just be prepared to do some digging and wade through a ton of fish pictures, especially since the app is currently skewed heavily male (men make up around 75 percent of the user base).

I picked Tinder because, love it or hate it, the instant gratification of the swipe is undeniable, and its expansive user pool means you’ll find active users almost anywhere. Based on numbers alone — over 75 billion total matches made in the app’s history and 4.2 million GIFs sent between matches per week — Tinder’s ability to put you in touch with a massive pool of people is hard to top. But the platform is also actively trying to make a cultural and financial comeback; its Q1 2026 earnings report revealed that new user registrations have finally returned to year-over-year growth. Match Group and Tinder CEO Spencer Rascoff recently stated that “winning women is critical” to this continued growth, and that the platform must do a better job of driving positive outcomes for female daters.

In 2026, Tinder is evolving far beyond the simple swipe and giving users more control to find what they’re looking for. On the Explore page, you can now filter for specific relationship goals, from “Short-Term Fun” to a “Long-Term Partner” or even “Non-Monogamy.” The company has also been testing a paid height preference, so you might be able to get your 6-6-6 after all.

Tinder is also changing how people connect. Instead of one endless feed, you can now switch into specific modes like “Double Date Mode” (for a low-pressure group hang) or “College Mode.” According to Tinder, this is all part of an effort to give Gen Z “easier, low-pressure ways to connect” and, more importantly, to help you find “better matches, not just more of them.” Other new features include an AI matchmaking service called Chemistry, as well as Astrology and Music Modes.

Most importantly, safety has gotten a serious upgrade at Tinder. The app previously rolled out mandatory “Face Check” verification for all U.S. users, which requires a facial scan to verify you’re real before you can even start swiping. However, after a viral video demonstrated how romance scammers were tricking the system by hiding a digitally altered image at the end of their profiles, Tinder strengthened its photo verification logic by requiring “greater consistency” across every single photo on a user’s profile. This, combined with the “Share My Date” feature (which lets you send a link with your date’s location and photo to friends), shows that Tinder is finally taking user safety as seriously as its match count.