News & CultureBuying a New Mattress Has Never Been Easier (or Cozier)A batch of online start-ups are making it absurdly easy to buy a mattress. So intrepid bedroom correspondent Jeff Vrabel crammed four into his house, testing the contenders in the name of a better night's sleepMattress shopping is the worst shopping, unless you enjoy driving to the nearest low-rent strip mall and lying down fully clothed in the company of commission-starved salesmen. So when I needed a new mattress recently to replace my 12-year-old Sealy Posturepedic Plush Pillowtop (which I purchased from Dr. Seuss, apparently), I was delighted to find that the whole game has changed, thanks to online retailers.The digital brands typically sell just a single foam mattress and thus are idiot-proof: You click BUY, wait a few days for delivery, open the impossibly small box, and watch in amazement as your new bed expands. All this, in the name of happier slumber, can now be yours for less than $1,000.To explore my options, I started with industry leader Casper ($850 for a queen), which is known among people who make extremely Caucasian references as “the Warby Parker of mattresses.”
Casper's big idea is to top off two layers of memory foam (which is supportive but sleeps hot) with a layer of hypoallergenic latex. Frankly, it's still warm. But I found it to be the firmest of the bunch, which made it my preference, especially after spending a decade on my sag-tastic Sealy.My wife, on the other hand, preferred the cushier Tuft & Needle mattress ($600), which she promptly claimed for the rest of her life. It felt a few degrees cooler than Casper's, possibly due to its proprietary Adaptive Foam, which purports to embrace you like regular foam without turning your bed into an oven.The others I tried had names like strippers. Saatva's top-of-the-line Zenhaven ($1,899) turned out to be flippable, with one side firm and the other plush, which is just wonderful if you are chronically indecisive. Leesa's mattress ($890) came with a fabric cover and was made from three different foams, the mattress version of a MACH3 razor. It conformed beautifully to my side-sleeping tendencies.
(The trick to healthy side sleeping is to keep your spine aligned, and Leesa's mattress had just enough give in the right places for me.)I could talk all day about spine alignment and tri-cushioning foam magic. But what I really learned is that, as with Tinder matches, the best way to find the mattress you want is to sample a bunch and return the ones you don't like. Because that's the other great thing about our modern mattress world: The dot-com brands all offer trial periods (75 days for Saatva, 100 for the others) and return policies (returns often go straight to charity). It's worth the time and energy to get this right. Once you do, you'll never pretend-nap in a strip mall again.If you’re like me, your mattress is fine. You bought something smack dab in the middle of your price range, and now that you’re a few years into your life together, you’re thinking, “Damn, maybe I could have gotten something more luxe for myself.” Or at least spent a little more time Googling ‘good mattresses that last a long time’ and ‘average mattresses good reviews.’
You’re by no means dealing with something so shitty you need to replace it, but you know your bed’s not as comfortable as it could be. This past Summer, I discovered a product on Amazon called the Ultra Premium Visco Elastic Memory Foam Mattress Pad Bed Topper (lol), and a company called Red Nomad is selling them for a reasonable $79.99. I have a Queen sized bed and have been sleeping on the 2-inch pad for four months now, and guys, it’s pretty nice.Here is the link to the pad. It’s going to look like an ad when I drop it, but that’s just how Medium’s formatting works. It is actually a link that I have chosen to put into this post. Here it comes:Queen Size 2 Inch Thick, Ultra Premium Visco Elastic Memory Foam Mattress Pad Bed Topper. Didn’t it look like an ad? Me talking about it this much sounds like I’m being sarcastic, but I’m not. The pad comes compactly wrapped in a small, travel-friendly form, but quickly unfurls and puffs up once you get it out of the packaging.
You know how jeans smell wild when you first buy them, and then after a wear or two they smell like your laundry detergent and gross body just like everything else you own? That is the journey you’ll go on with your mattress pad. I’d say mine smelled like “house air” within an hour or two, but your timing will depend on how powerful your own house air is.Now that we’ve gotten the number one Weird Deterring Element from the Reviews* out of the way, I can focus on the good things: this pad makes your bed super cushiony, but doesn’t rob you of the firmness you crave. This assessment is obviously anchored in my own personal preferences, but 2 inches seems like the perfect amount of foam padding. If you disagree, the company also offers 3-inch and 4-inch options—live your truth—but with the 2-inch, my gently-aging mattress suddenly feels luxurious again. I do not sink into my bed, I would not call it a deep bed, but I would call it a noticeably comfortable bed. You know how sometimes you go to a hotel and it’s nice to just peel back fresh sheets and interact with puffy bedding?
Your bed can feel like that if you want! Even if you don’t make it in the morning!Let me describe my rig: I already had a fitted sheet-style mattress topper (like this one), so I opted to position my foam pad under that and then use the fitted elastics to hold it in place. Then, I put my sheets and blankets on the bed as usual. The fitted sheet definitely goes on a little more snugly than it used to with all this new crap underneath, but the extra inches don’t cause long-term sheet problems. All the corners stay where I want ’em. I go to sleep every night like someone with a nicer mattress than she has.The company claims to have something called CoolFlow Ventilation technology in the pads if you’re a particularly sweaty sleeper, and also boasts “no formaldehyde, flame retardants, heavy metals, phthalates or ozone depleters.” I can’t definitively say whether a mattress topper is a product you need, but if you feel so inclined, I’ve found a good one and I’d like to pass the savings on to you.*This phenomenon is called “off-gassing” and is just some science that happens briefly once your pad gets unboxed.