Mattresses: What’s Your Favourite Filling?
To make sure you’re equipped with all the right knowledge when shopping for your new mattress, take a look at our guide covering what you need to know about what fillings and how much goes into a mattress.
Choosing the right filling for your mattress can be as important as ensuring that it’s going to fit in your bedroom.
What your mattress is filled with can impact on the levels of support and comfort it offers, the heat it does or doesn’t retain, and how much air passes between the fibres.
However, with so many types of mattress on the market, even knowing where to start can give you sleepless nights! Instead of worrying, sidestep the stress and use our easy to use guide on how to find the mattress filling that’s best for you and the way you sleep.
Before you even start to think about the difference between latex or pocket sprung mattresses, you need to know a little about GSM.
This stands for grams per square metre and is a measure of the weight of the filling inside the mattress. As a rule of thumb, the greater the GSM, the denser the material inside. In comfort terms, this means that a mattress with a high GSM will be more supportive and comfortable than one with a lower rating. Mattresses with a higher GSM are also more likely to last longer and aren’t as affected by settlement when compared to their lower-ranking counterparts.
GSM is rarely revealed by manufacturers, who would rather you weren’t able to make a mattress-to-mattress comparison. At Winston’s, we know that a new mattress is a significant and important investment, so we like to give our customers all the information they need to make the right choice. This includes being transparent about the GSM ratings of each of our mattresses.
The term ‘natural fibres’ covers a multitude of materials.
Typically, natural fibre mattress fillings can consist of bamboo, alpaca, wool, hemp, cashmere or even latex (which is made from the sap of a southeast asian rubber tree).
If comfort is important to you but your budget won’t stretch to natural fibres, a blended fibre mattress might be the way forward.
Just to make things interesting, memory foam isn’t rated by GSM, as there are no loose fibres.
Instead, they’re measured according to how many layers of foam make up a mattress. Like GSM, the higher the rating, the greater the levels of comfort and support.
Ultimately, choosing a mattress comes down to personal preference.
However, knowing about factors such as GSM can help you get more bed for your buck.
At Winston’s, we like to give our customers as much information as possible to help them buy the mattress that’s best for them. However, if there are any questions you need answering then get in touch and we’ll be only too happy to help.
Published: 4th April 2021 (Updated: 2nd September 2023) |