SAN FRANCISCO, Ca., January 2 — You’re budgeting enough time for sleep, but you still occasionally wake up feeling like you could remember the number of that truck that hit you if you had just a few more slaps at the snooze button. And those rickety joints are just a part of age, of course. Better buy a big bottle of Advil and plan to squeeze out a little more time in bed, right? Wrong.
How did astronauts and racehorses give you sweeter slumber? In the Beginning. Check a few Ancient Egyptian tombs — or at least renew your National Geographic subscription — and you’ll see proof that pillows were originally the property of the very wealthy. Pillow as art form came later, in China and Medieval Europe, and this specialized form became not-so-specialized when the Industrial Revolution put decorative cushioning within reach of the masses. As for the comfort part, used to be you could tell a tax bracket by the pillow filling — the penny-pinchers went for straw, while the spare-no-cost crowd flaunted their feathers.
Innovations
NASA shot for the stars in the mid 1960s in trying to come up with a material to cushion astronauts from the crushing g-forces of launch and re-entry. The result: visco-elastic memory foam, which still fetches a lofty price in mattress form but just happens to provide years of affordable, blissful slumber on the scale of pillows. This discovery, whose properties of pressure-point relief and improved blood flow were so valued that trainers bought huge slabs to treat their ailing prize racehorses, immediately challenged all forms of filler on the market to step up by raising the bar — and lowering the premium price tag — on genuinely therapeutic comfort.
What’s In It For You?
Support. You might not be able to tell your buckwheat hull filling from your viscoelastic memory foam from your Fossfill, but here’s what they’ve got in common: after you spend a night atop any of these, you might wonder how you never noticed that your old pillows were filled with cardboard.
Shape. Whether you prefer circles, squares, rectangles, L’s, U’s, butterflies, or cylinders, you’ll find a place to rest your pretty little head (and neck and shoulders and spine, for that matter).
Serene sleep. Fidget, shift, toss, turn, jostle, flinch, pound pillow in frustration. Yup. Sounds restful, all right. Stick with that strategy, or just put your head down on one of these, pick it back up in eight hours, and wake to a whole new shiny world.
Meet your match:
Round? Square? Cotton? Satin? Feathers? Fibers? Foam? Standard or cervical? Body or butterfly? Okay, okay... don’t lose any sleep over this; just relax and read about our favorites:
| | Save & Share |  Save 5% on any Pillow Pair!
5% off; 2 units minimum. Enter coupon code PLW4U at check out. Coupon valid through 1/12/2007 at | | |
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Tell us why you're so curious -- give us a good enough story, and we'll give you the inside scoop. (Nobody wants pennies these days anyway.) Send your reply to readers@mercantila.com | | |
