Urethane Blog

Mattresses Make the New Yorker

June 20, 2022

How to Buy a New Mattress Without a Ph.D. in Chemistry

The disrupter economy has set its sights on your bedroom, offering gel capsules, ice fabric, green-tea memory foam, and copper-infused toppers. Will they help you get a better night’s sleep?

By Patricia MarxJune 20, 2022 Image may contain Text Label Clothing and Apparel More than forty-five per cent of mattress purchases in the U.S. are made online.Illustration by Anna Haifisch

Before we can talk about buying a new mattress, you’ll need a Ph.D. in chemistry and another in mechanical engineering. How else to make sense of the latest concepts in mattress technology—for instance, hyperelastic polymer, buckling column gel, phase-change molecule fabrics, ballistocardiograph sensors, ice fabric, and 3-D-matrix layers? A master’s degree in marketing and bullshit will also come in handy.You will have plenty of time to pursue your degree in mattress studies because you no longer have to get out of bed to buy a new bed. No more lolling on a mattress in a showroom, as if you’re in a Marina Abramović installation. More than a hundred online merchants will deliver a mattress to you, rolled up like a Drake’s Yodel in a box the size of a doghouse that a cocker spaniel would feel cramped in. I could not sample every e-commerce mattress. Some companies require a customer to live with the purchase for at least a month before sending it back, and where was I supposed to store an extra mattress, let alone a dormitory’s worth of them? I did obtain, and later un-obtain, a couple of mattresses online. Who’d have thought that I, someone who spent years fastidiously fingering duvet covers to find the right softness, would be throwing caution to the wind and ordering a mattress on my computer? Welcome, mattresses, to the weird new disrupter world, where your neighbors include prescription eyeglasses, used clothes, and pets.

While I waited for my mattresses to be delivered, I hit some mattress stores. Aside from variations in size and upholstery, all mattresses look alike. Are they?Let’s start with the basic types: innerspring coil, foam, hybrid (foam and innerspring), and adjustable air. Within each category are subcategories. There seem to be more kinds of foam mattresses than there are craft beers from Brooklyn, but don’t be fooled by proprietary terms like “Ambien-injected kosher crypto-foam.” There are actually only two types of foam: polyurethane, of which memory foam is a subset, and latex.You’re just getting started making decisions, however. What level of firmness do you like? Do you sleep on your side, back, or stomach? When your bedmate tosses and turns, how much does it disturb you (on the Richter scale)? Do you want your mattress all-natural, or will a soupçon of nature do? Do any of the following materials alarm you: soy, hemp, horsehair, mohair, coconut fibre, green tea, polylactide derived from sugarcane? Are you for or against heat-conductive copper flecks? Is the amount of “edge support” that your mattress provides a matter of life and death? How much extra are you willing to pay for latex foam that is flash-frozen before it is baked, or will mere baking suffice?“Which mattress should I get?” I asked Alex, a Saatva “sleep guide” who works in the company’s New York showroom. “It depends on your palate,” he said, like a waiter who’d been asked whether he recommends the chicken piccata or the trout amandine. Saatva is an e-commerce company, the parent of Loom & Leaf and Zenhaven, two other big names in direct-to-consumer bedding. Merchandise in the showroom is available for experiencing but not for purchasing. The lighting is subdued, the color scheme neutral; here and there, beige artificial trees are not growing. I surveyed the thirteen beds positioned throughout the space. Of the mattresses you can buy online, Saatva was named by Good Housekeeping “Best Overall.” ($1,695. Note: All prices here are for a queen, which is what forty-seven per cent of Americans sleep on.)

Read the entire article here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/27/how-to-buy-a-new-mattress-without-a-phd-in-chemistry