To help us provide you with free impartial advice, we may earn a commission if you buy through links on our site. Learn more
- Comfort and support for side and back sleepers
- Choice of sizes is a useful, and rare, benefit
- Unique shape might not be for everyone
- Very expensive
Once upon a time, Tempur was considered the first, and last, word in memory foam – years before bed-in-a-box brands emerged and began manufacturing foam mattresses and bedding left, right and centre.
But far from being usurped by the new age mattress market, Tempur is still in many ways synonymous with the material. The brand’s Original SmartCool pillow stands out for its unique curved shape, designed to cradle your neck and shoulder for optimum pressure relief.
It’s an effective design, but I can see its ergonomic curvature making it a strange bedfellow of sorts, a divisive pillow that won’t be for everyone. And on top of that, it’ll cost you almost £150.
What do you get for the money?
Tempur products aren’t cheap, and the Original SmartCool pillow is no exception. It costs £149 full price, and that’s the same price for all three size options (Queen Medium, Queen Large and Queen X-Large).
The pillow has a flat base with a curved top that is slightly loftier on the side that is designed to support your neck, while the middle section is sloped to contour to your head. It’s made from a solid slab of memory foam with a removable cover made with the brand’s “SmartCool technology” to ensure a cool-to-the-touch feel and superior temperature regulation. This cover can also be machine washed at 40°C.
The pillow comes with a three year guarantee and Tempur also offers a 30-night pillow trial. If, during those 30 nights, you decide the pillow is not for you, you can return it for a full refund. Returns are free via the brand’s returns request form, though Tempur asks customers to contact customer service first so that its team can “work with you to answer your questions and resolve your concerns”.
What does it do well?
I tested the Tempur Original SmartCool pillow (in size Queen Medium) for a few weeks in late May, alongside my regular pillow (the Otty Deluxe Pure). I found it largely comfortable and, although the curvature of the pillow took a little getting used to, the shape succeeded at its intended job of supporting my head and neck whether I was lying on my side or my back. I’d describe Tempur’s memory foam as ‘medium firm’. It can feel quite dense, but it responds well to the weight of my head and bounces back into shape quickly.
Having a choice of sizes is also a great benefit, one that I rarely see offered by brands, and arguably a particularly useful one given the ergonomic design of the pillow. Tempur offers some guidance on how to choose the best size for you, by considering your upper body size, height, weight and the firmness of your mattress.
What could be improved?
Considering its namesake, I wasn’t hugely impressed by the Original SmartCool pillow’s cooling properties: it didn’t necessarily feel cool to the touch. However, neither did I feel like my head was overheating during the night. Credit where credit is due, this is an achievement in itself for an all-foam pillow.
While I myself had a good experience, the ergonomic curvature of the pillow strikes me as something of a love-or-hate design. My partner, for instance, found it less comfortable and a bit unnatural, being used to more traditional pillows. Customer ratings on Tempur’s website are rather disparate too, further suggesting that the SmartCool pillow could be a bit of a marmite product. This said, with a 30-night trial to make use of, there’s no reason not to try it out if you’re on the fence.
On the other hand, if you’re paying almost £150 for a pillow – the design of which you’re not even sure is right for you – then a 30-night trial feels less like a perk and more like a deserved fallback, the lack of which might even seem unjustified. I’m no stranger to hefty investments in the pillow market. Consider the Emma Premium Cloud Pillow (£80), or the Simba Hybrid (£109), for example. The Original SmartCool, however, is an investment the price of which is exceeded by few rivals. As my memory serves, of all the pillows we’ve tested in the past few years, the only one that costs more than this is the Simba Hybrid Firm pillow at £159.
Should you buy the Tempur Original SmartCool Pillow?
The question to ask, then, is whether or not the Tempur Original SmartCool is worth such a high price. I’d say the answer is yes, with some heavy caveats.
Ultimately, Tempur no longer has the monopoly on memory foam bedding. And when there are so many good pillows available at two-figure rather than three-figure prices, it becomes harder to justify the Original SmartCool’s £149 price tag. If you’re dead set on an ergonomic pillow such as this, or you need one to curb problematic neck pain, it’s a justified investment: the Original SmartCool is a comfortable and supportive option. But if you can’t stomach the cost, there are plenty of other great pillows that deliver almost the same experience at a fraction of the price.
