As an individual who runs scorching, I’m no stranger to waking up in the course of the night time slick with sweat, my pillow roughly the identical temperature because the floor of the solar. Uninterested in sweating by way of my pillowcase, I turned to Wirecutter’s bedding and pillow consultants for recommendation, hoping they’d unveil the secrets and techniques to discovering a pillow that doesn’t warmth up all through the night time.
However because it seems, holding the cool aspect of the pillow cool is a thriller that even our sleep consultants haven’t been in a position to crack.
“Pillows are the toughest of the bedding classes to discover a cooling answer,” mentioned senior employees author Jackie Reeve, who’s discovered the perfect bedsheets, blankets, and comforters for decent sleepers. “It was the white whale of my time testing pillows.”
It’s because our heads are heavy—Jackie compares them to 10-pound bowling balls—and so they are likely to generate loads of warmth. Most pillow fillings take up and retain that warmth, with dense reminiscence foam being the largest perpetrator. For decent sleepers like me, this makes already-warm nights that a lot sweatier.
There was one pillow on our sleep writers’ radar, nonetheless, that they thought simply is perhaps the reply to stressed, sweat-slicked nights: the Purple Concord Pillow.

A relative newcomer on the cooling-pillow scene, the Purple Concord Pillow units itself aside from different cooling pillows due to its development. Most pillows made with cooling expertise are fabricated from reminiscence foam infused with a particular gel that’s supposed to soak up and dissipate warmth. However the Concord has a latex core lined within the firm’s proprietary “Purple Grid”—a squishy, stretchy honeycomb-style grid (created from hyper-elastic plastic) that’s meant to assist your head whereas concurrently selling airflow by way of the pillow. That airflow is meant to assist hold the pillow cool all night time lengthy.
The sleep consultants at Wirecutter haven’t but examined the Concord, however sleep-team employees author Caira Blackwell tried the pillow at a mattress commerce present in 2022, and he or she informed me she has “not stopped considering of it since.” On social media, Purple Concord Pillow reviewers additionally rave concerning the ultra-comfortable grid, touting this pillow as the one one that truly retains them cool.
So I made a decision to check out the Purple Concord myself. I slept with it for 3 weeks straight—together with all through a July heatwave—to see whether or not this might be the reply to all the time sleeping on the cool aspect of the mattress.