As a person who runs hot, I’m no stranger to waking up in the middle of the night slick with sweat, my pillow roughly the same temperature as the surface of the sun. Tired of sweating through my pillowcase, I turned to Wirecutter’s bedding and pillow experts for advice, hoping they’d unveil the secrets to finding a pillow that doesn’t heat up throughout the night.
But as it turns out, keeping the cool side of the pillow cool is a mystery that even our sleep experts haven’t been able to crack.
“Pillows are the hardest of the bedding categories to find a cooling solution,” said senior staff writer Jackie Reeve, who’s found the best bedsheets, blankets, and comforters for hot sleepers. “It was the white whale of my time testing pillows.”
This is because our heads are heavy—Jackie compares them to 10-pound bowling balls—and they tend to generate a lot of heat. Most pillow fillings absorb and retain that heat, with dense memory foam being the biggest culprit. For hot sleepers like me, this makes already-warm nights that much sweatier.
There was one pillow on our sleep writers’ radar, however, that they thought just might be the answer to restless, sweat-slicked nights: the Purple Harmony Pillow.
This unique pillow, made with an airy latex filling and wrapped in Purple’s stretchy honeycomb grid, is extremely comfortable and supportive. It’s cool to the touch at first, but it retains heat as the night goes on.
A relative newcomer on the cooling-pillow scene, the Purple Harmony Pillow sets itself apart from other cooling pillows because of its construction. Most pillows made with cooling technology are made of memory foam infused with a special gel that’s supposed to absorb and dissipate heat. But the Harmony has a latex core covered in the company’s proprietary “Purple Grid”—a squishy, stretchy honeycomb-style grid (made from hyper-elastic plastic) that’s meant to support your head while simultaneously promoting airflow through the pillow. That airflow is supposed to help keep the pillow cool all night long.
The sleep experts at Wirecutter haven’t yet tested the Harmony, but sleep-team staff writer Caira Blackwell tried the pillow at a mattress trade show in 2022, and she told me she has “not stopped thinking of it since.” On social media, Purple Harmony Pillow reviewers also rave about the ultra-comfortable grid, touting this pillow as the only one that actually keeps them cool.
So I decided to try out the Purple Harmony myself. I slept with it for three weeks straight—including throughout a July heatwave—to see whether this could be the answer to always sleeping on the cool side of the bed.
