Summer is almost over, but you can sleep better year round if you have one the best cooling mattress. Ordinary mattresses trap more body heat the longer you stay in bed, which negates the reason a healthy night’s sleep feels so good in the first place. When you sleep with a best cooling mattress, the mattress technology helps keep you cool, dry, and comfortable so you wake up refreshed and ready for whatever your day will bring. Many mattresses have a single cooling gel layer, but during the night the gel rises closer to your body temperature and can no longer pull excess body heat away as when you first went to bed. If you choose the best cooling mattress, however, your sleeping environment works to keep you cool and comfortable as long as you remain in bed. If you choose the best cooling mattress type wisely, you’ll never again wake up in the middle of the night clammy and sweating from accumulated body heat.
Best Cooling Mattress 2022
The mattresses below all have cooling features to help you stay comfortable while you sleep. One of them is truly the best cooling mattress for you. While each brand’s cooling mattresses are available in various sizes, we list the price for the queen size cooling mattress for each brand to make it easier to compare the deals.
Serta Arctic Mattress
We give the Serta Arctic Mattress the nod as the best cooling mattress because it has three distinct layers of cooling technology that work together to pull excess heat away from your body as you sleep. In addition to the usual range of sizes from Twin to California King, Serta Arctic Mattresses come in two mattress heights, 13.5 inches and 14.5 inches, and each is available with foam or hybrid construction.
Serta Arctic Mattresses have four layers. The top three layers work in concert with what Serta calls the Reactex System. The top layer has up to 15 times the cooling power of a non-cooling mattress top. This layer actively draws excess heat down from your body. The second layer consists of Serta’s CustomFit HD Memory Foam that provides supportive comfort while it transfers the heat from above further below. The third layer, Sera’s EverCool Fuze Gel Memory Foam is a second line of active heat defense with its own cooling technology that continues the downward heat transfer away from your body. The lowest level, Serta’s Foam Core with Edge to Edge support provides a solid base for the entire Arctic Mattress system, ensuring that you remain secure and stable while the top three layers support and conform to your body as they draw off sleep-robbing excess body heat. When you move during the night, which generates extra body heat, the reactive top layer continues the heat dissipation, so you continue enjoy restful sleep.
Casper Wave Mattress
The Casper Wave Hybrid mattress employs a combination of ventilating perforations, breathable foam, and a thin cooling gel layer to help you stay cool from the moment you get in bed through the time you sleep. The Wave Hybrid mattress uses up to 86 gel pods to support your body. According to Casper, the pods provide more support than foam alone. The gel pods are place strategically along your spine, waist, and lower back.
The Casper Wave Hybrid’s cooling feature includes a layer of AirScape 3 perforated breathable foam just under the thin gel layer. Casper’s AirScape 3 foam incorporates three separate layers of foams that allow body heat and humidity to flow away from the mattress and your body. Casper also has an optional Wave Hybrid Snow Mattress that adds a HeatDelete Band and a spring that add lift to the mattress to support airflow.
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Tempur-Pedic Breeze Collection
Tempur-Pedic’s Breeze mattresses use four layers of breathable material to help you keep your cool while you rest. Breeze mattresses are available in two versions: PRObreeze which feels up to 3 degrees cooler and LUXEbreeze to feel up to 8 degrees cooler. Both Breeze versions have four four active layers for support and comfort.
The top layer on Breeze mattresses is a cool-to-the-touch SmartClimate cover with embedded cooling fibers. Next the PureCool+ Phase Change Material pulls excess heat away from your body. The third layer in the system is the Tempur-CM+ comfort laver that allows heat and humidity to flow through the material. The bottom layer of Breeze mattresses is a smart pressure-relieving material with a breathable design. The LUXEbreeze model’s lowest layer adds ventilation for additional cooling power.
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Saatva Classic Mattress
The Saatva Classic Mattress is the company’s flagship hybrid foam and innerspring mattress. The Saatva Classic has cooling features in the surface layer, but the greater focus with this mattress is on its enhanced back support and supportive coils. The top layer of the Saatva Classic is a 3-inch Euro-style pillow top covered with breathable cotton. The focus with Saatva’s Classic Mattress is on support and comfort more than providing multiple cooling features and layers.
Saatva Classic customers also benefit from the robust coil support system that encourages fabric and layer breathability, but this mattress does not include the cooling get technology we see in the best cooling mattress from other brands.
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Layla Mattress
If sleeping on metal doesn’t sound like a way you’d like to stay cool on hot and steamy summer nights, read further. Layla Sleep uses a top memory foam layer with copper gel in the foam. The copper in the foam helps it to stay soft and firm to minimize heat-producing compression. According to Layla Sleep, particles of copper in the gel are highly conductive. Unlike conventional foam materials, the copper draws away heat more quickly, which helps you to avoid accumulating excessive heat while you sleep, which in turn helps you sleep better.
The copper gel in Layla’s Memory Foam mattress does more than help you stay cool. Copper also has antimicrobial properties which set up a barrier to defeat odor-causing bacteria. By minimizing the bacteria buildup in your mattress, it stays fresher, which can also enhance your sense of comfort and cleanliness. The 3-inch thick layer of Layla Copper-Gel Memory Foam is designed specifically for its soft and plush feel as well as rapid cooling and body heat transfer.
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Purple Mattress
The Purple Mattress uses a grid structure of gel that both supports and helps sleepers stay cool during the night. Cooling with the gel is enhanced by the breathable structural design. The original Purple mattress features support for your back with a 2-inch thick GelFlex Grid on top of a dual-layer base of comfort foam. Like the other mattresses in this list, the Purple Mattress is available in standard sizes from twin to California King.
Purple has a second mattress line called the Purple Plus Mattress. The main additional features of the Purple Plus line include an extra 2-inch layer of foam plus greater breathability. Breathability is a good thing and can help with cooling, although it’s not an active functional component such as Serta’s reactive heat transfer materials or Layla’s copper gel.
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Best Cooling Mattress FAQ
In our search for the best cooling mattress, we considered active versus passive cooling factors, interaction to dissipate heat and moisture among multiple layers layers, material breathability, and overall structural design to support sleepers.
What is the Best Cooling Mattress?
Serta’s Arctic Mattress get the honors as the Best Cooling Mattress. The Arctic Mattress has a reactive heat transfer top layer combined with a supportive comfort level that promotes downward airflow and a third layer of cooling gel within another layer of memory foam. Those top three active layers are supported by a bottom layer of structural memory foam that enables the mattress’ cooling functions to operate freely without undue compression or twisting.
If you live in a tropical climate without air conditioning or if you’re an especially hot sleeper you might want to consider the upgraded Serta Arctic Premier Mattress’ additional cushioning and reactive contouring to allow body heat to flow away while you sleep.
Do Cooling Mattresses Work?
If you’ve never awakened in the middle of the night drenched with perspiration even though the room isn’t overly hot, you’re one of an extremely fortunate few. The greatest problem with excess heat when you sleep doesn’t come from the air, but from your own body. Humans generate a lot of body heat. If that heat is trapped in your bed covers close to your body, it’s like a thermal cocoon. Even in the winter, if you live in an area where it gets noticeably cold, accumulated body heat may not wake you up, but the dampness from constant if minor perspiration can cause you to feel clammy and anything but refreshed when you get up.
Suitably designed mattresses can indeed help with both personally generated heat and humidity. As you may have read above, there are many techniques for wicking off heat and moisture, some passive and a few relatively active. The point is, even though different mattress companies use different cooling technologies or methods, cooling mattresses do indeed work. The best cooling mattress is the one that works best for you. However, as we’ve seen, mattresses such as the Serta Arctic Mattress that entail multiple materials and layers each with unique cooling effects that also work together, are the best for cool, dry, comfortable rest.
Which Type of Mattress Is Best for Cooling?
Discussions of mattress types usually refers to innerspring, memory foam, or hybrid mattresses that combine both foam and springs. It’s hard to argue against the active heat transfer effect of gel-infused memory foam, whether the gel is in sheets, pellets, grids, or pods. A single features such as a top layer of gel-infused memory foam, even with a breathable cover, may be enough cooling for some people, but a system that uses other mattress layers to draw or push the heat further away from the sleeper, whether down or sideways, is truly the best cooling mattress design concept.
We’d argue that it seems pretty clear then, that a foam mattress is necessary for effective body heat transfer, but hybrids with one or more layers of coil springs for added support and comfort could also be a part of the cooling design, especially in the role of supporting other layers through which the heat flows but also if the coils provide a relatively open path for the heat to exit the mattress.
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