The only time it’s okay to be sweaty is during your workout—NOT while you’re sleeping. Whether you’re a hot sleeper (or sleep next to a hot sleeper), have hot flashes, or live somewhere hot, you’ve probably woken up in the middle of the night wondering who turned the furnace on. Enter: the Cooling Pillow. Cooling pillows are a fantastic tool for the hot sleeper, and while it can’t totally fix every problem, it can at least ensure a more comfortable experience most nights. When paired with things like airy or cool sheets, cooling mattresses or pads, and a fan, most sleepers can find that they can manage quite well.
We reviewed some of the most popular cooling pillows out there so YOU don’t have to sleep sweaty another night. Check out our favorites and ensure you get the cooling night’s sleep you deserve! This article has been written in paid partnership with SBLY Brands.
When it comes to flexibility, the Dosaze Hybrid Cooling Pillow takes the cake. Our favorite elements of his pillow are the combo foam core/adjustable fill and the fantastic cooling and anti-microbial fabric it was made of.
The Coop is one of the most popular pillows around, mostly due to the self-adjustable fill that the product comes with. The Dosaze pillow offers the self-fill feature that Coop offers while also having a supportive memory foam core. Together, the outer adjustable fill can offer varying levels of softness, while the inner memory foam core provides rigidity. This combo can help people with neck or back pain, while also offering some flexibility to back, side, or stomach sleepers. Plus, you can adjust as needed!
To top it off, the ThermaCool cover is great for sweaty sleepers and those in need of some temperature regulation. We don’t know exactly how Dosaze is doing it, but their website says they use “350 GSM Proprietary Polycooling Fabric”, so they clearly have some secret tech they are cooking up in their pillow kitchen over there. Besides just the cover, the interior memory foam core is also designed to help with airflow and cooling, so you get internal and external approaches to the sweaty problem!
The Coop is another fantastic pillow, and it has quite the following. It was easily one of the best we reviewed. The standout feature of the Coop Home Goods Eden Pillow is that it uses a cooling-gel-infused shredded memory foam fill.
Famously, the Coop offers the adjustable fill, and the Eden is no different. The major difference is that they use a special shredded memory foam designed to promote cooling. The way that Coop approaches this means that the pillow itself can promote internal cooling, but the actual touch of the pillow may not feel cold on your skin. It’s more of a preference thing. Unlike the Dosaze, the Coop’s interior is exclusively shredded memory foam fill, so there is no core.
The SlumberCloud UltraCool Pillow is very well-reviewed, and its “claim to fame” is its use of NASA-inspired technology for its fill material. It’s marketed as a down-alternative, which generally means the pillow has a high loft that compresses when you lay your head down, and the SlumberCloud does, indeed, stay true to that.
Overall, the pillow is great and comes in a few firmness options (Dozase and Coop approach this by just giving you a bag of fill material to alter the pillow as you see fit). Regarding value, the SlumberCloud isn’t all that expensive, and for what you get, it’s a quality budget option that doesn’t dip into the “cheap” territory. Oh, did we mention it’s a lovely shade of blue?
TempurPedic is a classic name in the bedding game, and they have an extensive pillow line marketed towards almost every niche imaginable. The pillow is great, but it is expensive. In fact, it’s so expensive that it’s actually tough to justify a pillow that costs this much without some serious benefits.
The pillow is very firm, and only heavier heads (generally men) can get this pillow to squish down enough to keep an even neck. The inside is a full memory foam core (hence, the firmness), and the outside is a high-tech cool-touch cover known as SmartClimate. It also offers cooling gel on the inside of the pillow AND the cover, so you definitely get that cooling sensation. One final note, this is NOT for stomach sleepers unless you want to have your spine try out some new shapes.
The Casper Snow Foam Pillow has a few features: four HeatDelete Bands across the pillow, AirScape foam to pull away heat, and a three-foam construction. Together, they create a great, breathable pillow.
While the “Snow” technology isn’t exactly specified, we think that it’s the combination of the HeatDelete Bands and the AirScape foam. One of our favorite aspects of the pillow was its hundreds of perforations in the foam, which Casper claims promotes airflow. More airflow usually means more cooling, so it’s a great feature to have. The HeatDelete Bands didn’t feel like anything extra special, however, and if you are going to have four patches of cooling, why not just go all out and make an entire side cooled? The texture and feel of the pillow’s core is fantastic. “Huggable” is what Casper uses to describe it, and we think that’s a great way to say it!
The Purple Harmony Pillow, unlike the others on our list, is a latex-filled pillow. Latex (theirs is hypoallergenic) is usually a bit firmer, has a slight elastic feel to it, and is usually quite clean due to the fact it doesn’t easily store dust and wicks moisture more readily when compared to materials like foam.
Like the mattresses and pads they sell, the pillow has a honeycomb grid to help distribute pressure evenly. On the pillow, this is combined with a cooling gel to help distribute heat. It isn’t full coverage, so there are spots where the cooling gel is clearly not present. The outer cover is pretty thin and breathable, which doesn’t really help cool itself, but it does give better contact to the cooling honeycomb grid under it.
Overall, we loved this pillow; it just isn’t necessarily a pillow designed for cooling.
The Marlow Pillow was just okay in our books, and one of the features definitely felt a little gimmicky. To start, the company doesn’t seem to focus on cooling as a major feature of this pillow. Instead, they seem to view it as a cool (lol) secondary feature. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but for a list exclusively about finding the coldest, most comfortable pillow around, we would have loved to know more about what makes this pillow work and how well it regulates temperature.
The cooling mechanism is listed as a gel-infused memory foam and a breathable shell, which are all fine, nothing to complain about there. The real “gimmicky” feeling aspect of this pillow was how they talked about the zipper. First, the inclusion of a zipper on the side of the pillow “for airflow” doesn’t really create an internal draft like they would have you imagine. Second, Marlow also claims that opening the zippers is the best way to control the loft of the pillow itself. Opening the zipper makes it loftier, closing it makes it more compact. Ehh. Pass.
Ahh, the MyPillow. Famous for many reasons, loved and equally hated by many. As far as pillows go, the MyPillow is… just alright. Similar to the Marlow, it feels sort of gimmicky and uses “interlocking” technology, which is essentially irregular pieces of foam that interlock when you lay on them, creating a more rigid structure.
As far as cooling goes, the MyPillow doesn’t have any gel or cooling technology besides just being an overall lighter pillow. Our recommendation, if you love the MyPillow, would be to use it in tandem with the Dosaze ThermoCool Cover, which is part of the reason we love the Hybrid Pillow so much.
