They are the third most widely used form of contraception in the UK, behind the pill and hormonal implant, official data shows.
But a new survey reveals that a very small percentage of Britons use condoms.
According to a global survey of more than 29,000 people in 36 countries, only 15 per cent of Britons said they had bought condoms in the past year.
This compares with countries with the highest level of condom purchases, such as the United Arab Emirates, where 63 percent of respondents said they had recently purchased the contraceptive.
Vietnamese residents are also cautious: nearly half of participants living there use them.
A global survey on condom use found that those living in the Netherlands and Japan are the least likely to buy contraceptives.
But the UK is far from the most condom-averse country, according to a survey by Durex.
At the bottom of the list are Japan and the Netherlands, where only 12 percent of respondents said they had purchased condoms in the past 12 months.
Lovers in the US scored similarly to those in the UK, with just 16 per cent buying condoms.
Condoms are the most effective method of preventing sexually transmitted infections such as chlamydia, gonorrhea and herpes, and are effective in 95 percent of cases.
However, studies show that when condoms are used incorrectly, effectiveness drops to about 79 percent.
The Durex survey found that the most common reasons for not using condoms include a perceived lack of sensitivity (cited by 16 per cent of respondents), a lack of spontaneity (14 per cent) and the feeling that they ruin the mood (13 per cent).
Studies investigating the incidence of STIs around the world seem to reflect some of these data.
Only 15 per cent of the UK population say they buy condoms, according to a study of almost 30,000
According to a 2022 international report published in the journal Frontiers in Medicine, the region with the highest prevalence of STIs since 1990 is East Asia, including Japan, where only 12 percent of people buy condoms.
Belgium was said to have the lowest prevalence of STIs in the global study.
What’s more, according to data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, the Netherlands has the fifth-highest number of reported annual chlamydia cases of all European nations: approximately 24,000.
France, where only 16 percent of people regularly buy condoms, ranked seventh, with 14,199 cases of chlamydia reported in 2022.
In comparison, Cyprus, Greece and Croatia reported 10, 59 and 100 cases respectively.
Last year, around 402,000 sexually transmitted infections were diagnosed in the UK, with the most common being chlamydia (49 percent) and gonorrhea (21 percent).
Around 14 per cent of STIs detected in Britons were genital herpes or genital warts.
Overall, new STI diagnoses have decreased in the UK, but
In the last decade there has been a decrease in the number of new diagnoses of many STIs, but gonorrhea and syphilis have increased.
The number of gonorrhea diagnoses in 2023 was the highest since records began in 1918, while the number of syphilis diagnoses was the highest reported since 1948.
Experts are also concerned that gonorrhea has developed resistance to certain antibiotics, limiting available treatment options.