Life on Purple

This post is not about writing, editing, publishing, or book marketing. This is just me, a consumer, letting people know about my awesome new bed.

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2017: My husband and I began researching mattresses, specifically the bed in a box types. Over and over, Purple rose to the top. It didn’t matter what review we read/watched or what stats we looked at. Purple was consistently the best.

2018: While on vacation, we finally decided that we’d saved up enough money to buy the new mattress, and we did so. It arrived on our doorstep a couple days after we returned home, on Tuesday, March 27th. I immediately instagrammed it. Because that’s what modern culture does.

1 week, April 3rd: From the very first night, I slept better. I’ve had scoliosis pretty much my whole life, and being a side-sleeper with lots of turning of the sides means that I’ve had a hard time finding a comfortable mattress…ever. If it’s firm enough to support my lower back (which always dips down if I don’t have a narrow pillow under it), then it’s too firm for my hips and shoulder. Purple really did fix all of that. I was waking up without tension in my muscles, and feeling like I’d actually slept straight.

Keith, however, does not agree with me on this. From the very first night, he wakes up sore and tense (like I used to every single morning). He says he’s re-learning how to sleep because he’s got so many years of sleeping in odd positions to unlearn. He’s determined to give it at least a month, though, since that’s the average time for someone to adjust to a new bed.

The pillows: Oddly enough, the two purple pillows we ordered did not come with the mattress; they came on Monday, April 2nd. So we slept the majority of the first week with our old pillows. The Purple pillows are heavy suckers. Like, enough that you’re not going to be adjusting them while you’re asleep. So we lined them up in the center of the bed to form one continuous pillow (since we’re spooners, rather than edge sleepers). They’re only two inches thick, however. For the first time, Keith slept well with the new pillows. I did not. I’ve discovered that the reason I bought the pillows I’ve always bought still holds true: I need a pillow thick enough to fill the space between the side of my head and where my shoulder is on the bed. After one night on the pillows, we seem to have switched our stances on the bed.

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3 months, June 27th: Three months. We’re almost upon the end of our 100 day trial, and we’ve decided to keep the mattress. I’m definitely sleeping better, and Keith is pretty sure he is too. The biggest negative that Keith can see at this point is that now we have to dispose of the old mattress…and it’s not easy to move the Purple. At all. However, since it’s just as responsive as the day it came, and still just as strong, we don’t suspect we’ll ever need to flip it or rotate it or any of the other things you would do to move the old kind of mattress.

The pillows: After a couple of weeks of trying the pillow, I gave up and went back to my old pillows. I can tell I sleep much better on my old pillow. Keith still loves the purple pillow, though he put a couple of t-shirts under his pillow to lift it up a bit to the height he needed. I will attempt something similar for the next month, to see if that solves my problem of the pillow being too thin.

1 year, March 27, 2019: This has been an interesting year. I’ve been going through perimenopause, one of the symptoms of which is insomnia. Yes, I’ve been having trouble falling asleep due to this. However, once I do fall asleep, I sleep very soundly. We’re preparing to move, so we’ll know in a couple months just how easy it is to move the Purple mattress. There’s a handy little instruction guide on the Purple site showing you how to. The mattress is still in good condition, and we do not see any degradation in materials or effectiveness. Overall, we are very, very happy with our Purple mattress.

The pillows: I eventually gave up the old pillows and went back to the Purple pillow, with the addition of several t-shirts to boost the height a bit. Purple is currently beta-testing a different system than the one they’ve had to alter the height of their pillows. We applied, but did not get into that beta-test.