Tech
Night Sweats, Be Gone! Here Are the Best WIRED-Tested Cooling Mattresses
Honorable Mentions
There are a ton of mattresses and related items on the market that claim to have cooling benefits. Here are a few others we tested and liked, but not as much as the options above.
BedJet 3 for $427: WIRED reviewer Christopher Null liked this climate-control device a lot because it allowed him to sleep cool without having to buy a whole new mattress. This device uses a large blower under your bed to blast hot or cool air beneath your covers. If you like your existing mattress but find yourself sleeping hot, this could be just the ticket.
Courtesy of Sealy
Sealy Cocoon Chill Memory Foam Mattress for $919: Its surface is noticeably cool to the touch thanks to its exclusive phase change material, which works wonders at drawing and storing the body’s heat. This all-foam mattress leans firm, making it well-suited for back and stomach sleepers. If you’re a side sleeper looking for more body contouring, I’d suggest looking elsewhere. If you’re a stomach sleeper looking for a firm mattress that’s also cooling, this one will do the trick. There was almost no motion transfer in my testing, allowing my husband and me to get up at different times without disturbing each other. —Nicole Kinning
Casper Snow Hybrid for $2,595: When you come across a mattress with a name that includes “snow,” your expectations for cooling effects are naturally high—and this mattress indeed lives up to that expectation. Structurally, this hybrid bed combines poly foam, memory foam, and pocketed coils, and provides targeted support at the hips, waist, and lower back to alleviate pressure, making it ideal for back and stomach sleepers. I noticed it came out of the box slightly misshapen from its packaging and emitted a faint plasticky scent. After about two days, the mattress was ready to go, the smell gone, and it had settled into its intended neat rectangle shape. —Nicole Kinning
Saatva Memory Foam Hybrid for $2,049: The Saatva Memory Foam Hybrid is marketed as firm, and that’s exactly what you should expect. Crafted with patented AirCradle memory foam, the mattress features concentrated cushioning in the center, strategically intended to support your lower back. Since I’m only 5’2,” the middle-back cushioning didn’t hit where it was intended to. Despite its firmness, I didn’t find this mattress particularly exceptional, especially with its cooling properties. Despite incorporating a triple-phase LuxeCool system and cooling gel-infused memory foam, the cooling effect didn’t stand out. —Nicole Kinning
Courtesy of Wayfair
Wayfair Sleep 12-Inch Medium Cooling Gel Memory Foam Mattress for $500: This bed has four layers of hypoallergenic gel memory foam infused with green tea, using cooling technology and a breathable design to ensure you’re having a super-cool sleep. This medium-plush bed has two top layers of gel-infused memory and comfort foam to help with breathability and cooling, and the top material is a breathable knitted cover to aid in airflow circulation. This mattress had the perfect balance of soft cooling with the memory foam, and the breathable knitted cover also helped with airflow. Most importantly, though, I always slept coolly on this sleeper hit (pun intended).
Wayfair 10.5-Inch Plush Cooling Gel Mattress for $536 (King): This cooling gel hybrid mattress comprises five layers of various memory foams. The memory foam pillow top aims to relieve pressure points and help reduce motion transfer, and it has a breathable knit cover to aid in the cooling effect. The mattress is compatible with an adjustable base and has a 100-night trial and 10-year warranty. Although it doesn’t have as noticeable a cooling effect as some others on this list, it’s a true plush mattress that uses cooling gel technology at an affordable price.
Wayfair Sleep 8-Inch Medium Cooling Gel Memory Foam for $400: This super-cheap medium-firm cooling mattress has eight total inches of memory foam—the top layer of cooling gel, charcoal, and green tea-infused memory foams (to aid in freshness and odor absorption), followed by a soft comfort foam on a durable high-density foam base. The top layer has a breathable, woven jacquard design that helps to keep the sleeper cool and reduces motion transfer. The layers of ultra-cooling gel and green tea-infused memory foams help with the cooling effect and keep any odors at bay. This super-inexpensive mattress delivers well above expectations, but there are better cooling options on our list.
Wayfair Sleep 14-Inch Plush Cooling Gel Hybrid Mattress for $326 (Full): This plush cooling gel mattress features a top plush layer of gel memory foam to relieve pressure and help with airflow, plus the quilted Euro-top knit cover and sides promote continuous airflow around the mattress to keep the sleeper cool. The bed also features classic pocket coils below for structure and support, with layers of memory foams surrounding the coils (this helps with low-motion transfer, too). The mattress is also compatible with an adjustable bed base, has solid edge support, offers a 100-night trial, and has a 10-year warranty. I love a plush mattress, but it may be too plush for someone with a bigger body, since the first super-soft memory foam layer is on top of a coil system.
Wayfair Sleep 13.5-Inch Medium Cooling Gel Memory Foam Mattress for $550: This 13.5-inch cooling gel memory foam mattress is listed as medium, but I’d definitely consider it super-plush. The top layer has 2 inches of gel-infused memory foam and 4.5 inches of comfort foam, and the bottom layer is 7 inches of high-density base support foam. Like other cooling Wayfair mattresses, the top has a breathable jacquard pattern and is green tea-infused to help with freshness and cooling. The top layers of memory foam are designed to mold to your body and help relieve pains and achy joints. This in-a-box bed also has low-motion transfer, a 100-night trial, and a limited 10-year warranty. If you’re someone who wants a super-plush bed that helps to wick moisture, then I’d recommend this behemoth.
Compare the Best Cooling Mattresses
How Does WIRED Test Cooling Mattresses?
Mattresses are tested for at least a week, but in many cases for longer. I slept on the majority of these mattresses for half a month or more to really get a feel for the product. I tested them at different times of the season and with different types of sheets and bedding. I sat on the edges to test for edge support, jumped, and performed some other methods to test the bounce and motion transfer of the mattress. Perhaps most important for this guide, I was my normal, perpetually warm (and sweaty) self, and gauged more abstract things like my overall comfort at night, and how well I thought air flowed through the mattress, or how much heat was trapped in.
What Should You Look for in a Cooling Mattress?
When shopping for a cooling mattress, here are a few things to consider:
- Composition: Opt for mattress materials designed to promote airflow, which will help prevent heat buildup. Many mattresses are infused with gel or copper, which are designed to dissipate heat and keep you cool. A hybrid mattress combines the best of both worlds by using a coil support system under a foam, latex, or polyfoam comfort top. Hybrid mattresses tend to retain less heat than all-foam mattresses because they have a layer or two of springs to help dissipate heat.
- Cover fabric: Consider mattresses with covers made from moisture-wicking fabrics and phase-change fibers to draw sweat away from the body. Breathable fabrics include bamboo, Tencel lyocell, and synthetic fabrics, which are engineered to help regulate body temperature. Perforated cooling covers further amplify airflow between your body and the fabric. We find quilted tops help too, since they have ridges and valleys that allow air to escape.
- Airflow: With proper airflow, the heat you generate overnight is properly conducted through the mattress. Hybrid mattresses with individual coils help with this, but many mattresses marketed for their cooling benefits have other tricks.
- Firmness: While the debate of soft versus firm mattresses is a personal preference, your choice can play a crucial role in the way your body traps heat. Softer mattresses tend to envelop your body, leading to increased heat retention as your body sinks into the surface. Conversely, firmer mattresses provide better support and allow for more air circulation around your body.
How Did WIRED Select Models to Be Reviewed?
We have tested over 100 mattresses across all of our guides, like Best Organic Mattresses, Best Mattresses for Back Pain, and Best Mattresses You Can Buy Online, as well as for individual review. We talk with each other, discussing which mattress brands in general we’re fans of, and which we aren’t. Some mattresses are provided as review samples by the manufacturers, with the understanding that we don’t guarantee coverage or type of coverage—we aren’t paid for glowing reviews on products we think are just mid. We purchase and expense models we aren’t able to get a sample of.
We try to test a range of mattress types, firmness, and brands to ensure we know what’s out on the market, so we can best give you our honest, unbiased opinion on which mattresses you should spend your money (and one-third of your life sleeping) on.
What Does WIRED Do With Mattresses After Testing?
We keep top picks for longer-term durability testing in our own homes and the homes of other staffers, friends, and family members, while other models are donated locally.
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The wheel on the left side has options to adjust actuation distance, rapid-trigger sensitivity, and RGB brightness. You can also adjust volume and media playback, and turn it into a scroll wheel. The LED matrix below it is designed to display adjustments to actuation distance but feels a bit awkward: Each 0.1 mm of adjustment fills its own bar, and it only uses the bottom nine bars, so the screen will roll over four times when adjusting (the top three bars, with dots next to them, illuminate to show how many times the screen has rolled over during the adjustment). The saving grace of this is that, when adjusting the actuation distance, you can press down any switch to see a visualization of how far you’re pressing it, then tweak the actuation distance to match.
Alongside all of this, the Falcata (and, by extension, the Falchion) now has an aftermarket switch option: TTC Gold magnetic switches. While this is still only two switches, it’s an improvement over the singular switch option of most Hall effect keyboards.
Split Apart
Photograph: Henri Robbins
The internal assembly of this keyboard is straightforward yet interesting. Instead of a standard tray mount, where the PCB and plate bolt directly into the bottom half of the shell, the Falcata is more comparable to a bottom-mount. The PCB screws into the plate from underneath, and the plate is screwed onto the bottom half of the case along the edges. While the difference between the two mounting methods is minimal, it does improve typing experience by eliminating the “dead zones” caused by a post in the middle of the keyboard, along with slightly isolating typing from the case (which creates fewer vibrations when typing).
The top and bottom halves can easily be split apart by removing the screws on the plate (no breakable plastic clips here!), but on the left half, four cables connect the top and bottom halves of the keyboard, all of which need to be disconnected before fully separating the two sections. Once this is done, the internal silicone sound-dampening can easily be removed. The foam dampening, however, was adhered strongly enough that removing it left chunks of foam stuck to the PCB, making it impossible to readhere without using new adhesive. This wasn’t a huge issue, since the foam could simply be placed into the keyboard, but it is still frustrating to see when most manufacturers have figured this out.
Don’t call them hearing aids. They’re hearpieces, intended as a blurring of the lines between hearing aid and earbuds—or “earpieces” in the parlance of Lizn, a Danish operation.
The company was founded in 2015, and it haltingly developed its launch product through the 2010s, only to scrap it in 2020 when, according to Lizn’s history page, the hearing aid/earbud combo idea didn’t work out. But the company is seemingly nothing if not persistent, and four years later, a new Lizn was born. The revamped Hearpieces finally made it to US shores in the last couple of weeks.
Half Domes
Photograph: Chris Null
Lizn Hearpieces are the company’s only product, and their inspiration from the pro audio world is instantly palpable. Out of the box, these look nothing like any other hearing aids on the market, with a bulbous design that, while self-contained within the ear, is far from unobtrusive—particularly if you opt for the graphite or ruby red color scheme. (I received the relatively innocuous sand-hued devices.)
At 4.58 grams per bud, they’re as heavy as they look; within the in-the-ear space, few other models are more weighty, including the Kingwell Melodia and Apple AirPods Pro 3. The units come with four sets of ear tips in different sizes; the default mediums worked well for me.
The bigger issue isn’t how the tip of the device fits into your ear, though; it’s how the rest of the unit does. Lizn Hearpieces need to be delicately twisted into the ear canal so that one edge of the unit fits snugly behind the tragus, filling the concha. My ears may be tighter than others, but I found this no easy feat, as the device is so large that I really had to work at it to wedge it into place. As you might have guessed, over time, this became rather painful, especially because the unit has no hardware controls. All functions are performed by various combinations of taps on the outside of either of the Hearpieces, and the more I smacked the side of my head, the more uncomfortable things got.
Thinking Machines cofounders Barret Zoph and Luke Metz are leaving the fledgling AI lab and rejoining OpenAI, the ChatGPT-maker announced on Thursday. OpenAI’s CEO of applications, Fidji Simo, shared the news in a memo to staff Thursday afternoon.
The news was first reported on X by technology reporter Kylie Robison, who wrote that Zoph was fired for “unethical conduct.”
A source close to Thinking Machines said that Zoph had shared confidential company information with competitors. WIRED was unable to verify this information with Zoph, who did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
Zoph told Thinking Machines CEO Mira Murati on Monday he was considering leaving, then was fired today, according to the memo from Simo. She goes on to write that OpenAI doesn’t share the same concerns about Zoph as Murati.
The personnel shake-up is a major win for OpenAI, which recently lost its VP of research, Jerry Tworek.
Another Thinking Machines Lab staffer, Sam Schoenholz, is also rejoining OpenAI, the source said.
Zoph and Metz left OpenAI in late 2024 to start Thinking Machines with Murati, who had been the ChatGPT-maker’s chief technology officer.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
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