I suppose there’s something about accidentally cutting off a thumb that makes a body crave comfort. That’s certainly how things played out for my husband, a cabinetmaker, in the days after he lost half a digit to the table saw. After spending one long day in the trauma center and most of the next day at a hand clinic, Jamie and I were walking from the hospital to the subway when he made a sudden, unexpected, and deeply uncharacteristic left turn into a mattress store.
Despite its age, the nine-year-old queen-size memory-foam mattress we had at home was still fine. So fine, in fact, that even the germ of the idea of replacing it hadn’t entered the chat. But Jamie’s need to try mattresses on that day seemed visceral, and after Goldilocks-ing through a few pillow-topped monstrosities, he ended up peacefully supine on a Purple mattress for five minutes. Then seven minutes—all through the salesperson’s pitch.
After 10 minutes, I lay down beside him for moral support, and I immediately understood his inertia: The Purple mattress was unlike anything I had ever lay on (and I was alive when waterbeds were a thing). It was supple, springy, and just a bit jiggly, but in a good way. I was oddly reminded of the Irish blessing “May the road rise to meet you,” because that’s what all those pliant polymers were doing, just propping me up, supporting my weary bones, and cradling my every contour.
As we savasana’d, the salesperson talked about price, delivery, and old-mattress removal. On that day, facing the unknown variables of hefty medical bills and lost income from Jamie’s cabinetmaking work, we couldn’t justify the expense. But that afternoon marked the beginning of what has now been a five-year—and three-purchase—love affair with Purple mattresses.
Worth considering
Purple mattresses feature a layer of the proprietary GelFlex Grid, which feels cradling, buoyant, and a bit jiggly. Some people dislike how it feels, but others find the pressure relief and support to be unparalleled.
I’ll acknowledge here that Purple mattresses are an acquired taste. Their signature feature, the GelFlex Grid, is made from a proprietary material called Hyper-Elastic Polymer, which is layered with polyfoam or latex and, in hybrids, coils. Originally designed for medical uses, the GelFlex Grid sort of looks like a gelatinous Belgian waffle—and feels about as strange. But this jiggly lattice is excellent at relieving pressure while remaining supportive, breathable, and resilient, and it’s what won us over that fateful day.
Within eight months, Jamie had healed and gone back to work, and we had moved to a new place with a primary bedroom big enough for a king-size bed. And we knew exactly which one we wanted. Back at the mattress store, we bed-hopped the Purple offerings—trying out a model with a 2-inch GelFlex Grid layer, one with a 3-inch grid, and a hybrid model that included springs. After listening to our hearts (and our shoulders, hips, and lumbar regions), we settled on a king-size model with 2 inches of GelFlex Grid atop a coil base, then called the Purple Hybrid, and similar to the mattress currently sold as the Purple Restore Hybrid.
A few days later, an enormous plastic duffle bag was dumped on our stoop during a snow squall. Working together, Jamie and I heaved the thing into our bedroom, opened the weather-tight wrapping, and let the mattress unfurl and plump up on the platform bed frame that Jamie had built.
Compared with our old memory-foam mattress, the Purple mattress seemed to have minimal off-gassing, and we didn’t even wait 24 hours before we slept on it. For the first few days, after I spent the night in my go-to side-sleeping position, my lower back and hips felt achy. It was alarming enough that I casually perused the Purple’s return policy: free, but we would have to stick with the Purple mattress for at least 100 days. Mercifully, the soreness melted away within a week, perhaps as the mattress broke in or my body became used to it.
I came to realize that the Purple mattress was completely different from my previous mattresses. With the memory foam, I felt like my body compressed and flattened the mattress into something too compact and firm. Prior to that, I’d had a pillow-top innerspring model that felt like it supported only pressure points—my shoulder, hip, and thigh while I was side-sleeping, for instance—rather than my whole body. The Purple mattress, though, fully conformed to my contours yet remained resilient. Crucially, it pressed up against every curve and supported the entire length of my body when I lay on my side.
In fact, the Purple mattress was so comfortable, I began to expand my repertoire beyond side-sleeping. I slept in positions I never would have dreamt of on my old mattress: flat on my back like a paper doll, and even more daringly, on my stomach with my head nestled in the crook of my elbow. On my previous bed, my back would have swayed like an old gray mare’s. But the Purple mattress offered ample support for my stomach and hips and kept my spine comfortably aligned. Meanwhile, Jamie was in his own little bubble of untroubled sleep, all the way over on his side of the bed.
Five years after we brought it home, our Purple mattress is still as cradling and comfortable as the day it arrived. Our old memory-foam queen had developed a center ridge demarcating Jamie’s and my sleep zones. Our Purple mattress still doesn’t have that. We rotate it head to foot, when we remember to (which is probably half as often as we should).
Our king-size Purple mattress is so big, firm, and evenly supported that we once again had space for family snuggles and movie nights with our then-tweenage daughter (something that our old queen mattress hadn’t comfortably accommodated since she was in kindergarten). Sometimes our daughter even fell asleep and stayed through the night. Since clearly she too loved the Purple mattress, we replaced her cheap twin-size memory-foam mattress with a Purple mattress, as well. We later upgraded her to a queen-size Purple mattress (the model we bought is similar to the 8-inch PurpleFlex) so that she and her friends could pig-pile on for slumber parties.
I’ll now interrupt this regularly scheduled rhapsody to repeat: Purple mattresses are polarizing. My colleagues on Wirecutter’s sleep team have tested Purple mattresses at home and with panel testers, and they’ve found that the mattresses are well-made from durable materials (Purple is laudably transparent about what is inside its mattresses, a rarity in the mattress industry). But many people are simply turned off by the gooey jiggle of the GelFlex Grid. Luckily, Purple has a generous return policy, and you can try its offerings in many mattress stores.
I can see where the Purple skeptics are coming from. The edges of a Purple mattress can feel too mushy and unstructured: My fitted sheets often lose their grip and tend to pop off the top corners after about a week. (I see it as a reminder to change the sheets.)
But those soft edges worked in my favor recently, when I broke my arm and my physical therapist required me to lie on my stomach and dangle my arm over the side of the mattress. That would have been agony on other mattresses, but the Purple mattress’s softer edges allowed my arm to hang easily without digging into my bicep or racking my shoulder out of alignment. In fact, when we traveled over the holidays, sleeping on other mattresses felt like torture to me. My injured arm and I craved the Purple mattress—just as Jamie and his thumb did all those years ago. We give Purple four figurative (and three-and-a-half literal) thumbs up.
This article was edited by Courtney Schley and Maxine Builder.
