I bought the QUTOOL cooling pillow in the first week of March, along with four other small things for the bedroom, after a winter of waking at 3 a.m. and lying there for an hour. I am 61 and retired after 30 years as a school librarian. I sleep on the right side of a queen bed in a brick house outside Richmond, Virginia. My husband Dale sleeps on the left. Our standard poodle, Juniper, sleeps on her own bed at the foot of ours and shifts around some nights because of her joints. Nothing about our room is dramatic. The thermostat sits at 67. The problem was simply that I kept waking up warm.
I am not going to tell you a pillow fixed my sleep. It did not. What I will tell you is that the QUTOOL pillow removed one specific thing that was working against me every night, and once that thing was gone I could feel the difference in how quickly I got back to sleep after a wake-up. Here are ten reasons it earned its place on my bed, in plain terms, including the parts I do not love.
If I were starting over, this is the change I would make first
One standard QUTOOL pillow, shredded memory foam, fill you can take out, and a double-sided cover with one cool silky side. I removed a handful of foam in the first week and have slept on it every night since.
Amazon Check Today's Price on Amazon →It feels cool against your cheek the moment you lie down
The first thing I noticed, that first night, was the surface. The cover has a silky ice-fabric side, and QUTOOL says it lowers surface temperature by about 4 to 9 degrees. I cannot verify that with a thermometer at eleven at night. I can tell you it felt noticeably cooler against my face than the flat polyester pillow it replaced, and that cool feeling is what let me settle instead of flipping the pillow looking for a cold patch. It does warm up. More on that below.
One side is cool and silky, the other is soft, so it works in February too
The cover is double-sided. For most of the year I keep the cool side up. In January, when the bedroom holds onto a chill no matter what the thermostat says, I flip it over. That sounds like a small thing, and it is, but it means the pillow is not a one-season purchase. A cooling cover that only earns its keep in July would have been money badly spent. This one has a job in winter as well.
You can take foam out until it stops pushing your chin toward your chest
The fill is adjustable. You unzip the inner pillow and remove foam. I took out a good handful in the first week because it sat too tall under my neck and tipped my chin down. After that it was right. Shredded fill is not a solid block you have to live with. If you are between heights, you can tune it, and that is the reason I would buy this over a molded foam pillow for a first attempt.
The shreds move with your head instead of pushing back at it
The fill is 85 percent cross-cut memory foam and 15 percent soft microfiber. In practice that means the pillow does not behave like a slab. It shifts under your head and fills the gap under your neck when you turn onto your side. I am a side sleeper for most of the night and a back sleeper for the last hour before the alarm, and I do not have to punch it back into shape between positions.
It has not gone flat or lumpy in eight months
I have used it every night since that first week of March, which is about eight months now. The pillow it replaced had gone flat in the middle and I was folding it in half to get any height at all. This one has not done that. It is not the same pillow it was in March, because nothing is, but it has not collapsed into a pancake and it has not developed a hollow where my head sits.
It is a standard rectangular pillow, so your own pillowcases still fit
I did not have to buy anything else to use it. It is a standard rectangular pillow, it takes my regular pillowcases, and it sits in the same spot on the bed. That matters more than it sounds when you are changing one thing at a time and trying not to turn your bedroom into a renovation project. The old flat pillow went to the guest room and I have not missed it.
The cover comes off and goes in the washing machine
The cover unzips and can be machine washed and air dried with no heat. The foam cannot. QUTOOL is clear about this and so am I: cover only, no heat, and never put the shredded foam in the water. I wash the cover about once a month and let it dry over the back of a chair during the day. The 350 thread count polyester has held up fine through that.
Your neck stays supported without the pillow feeling like a brick
The pillow is soft, but it holds. My neck does not ache in the morning the way it did with the flat pillow, and I am not waking to fluff it up. The listing talks about neck and spine alignment, which is listing language. The plain version is that my head stays roughly level instead of sinking until my chin drops toward my chest. It is also CertiPUR-US, which I checked because I read labels.
It shortened my 3 a.m. wake-ups from an hour to about twenty minutes
I still wake some nights. Usually once, around three, and I am back asleep in about twenty minutes instead of the hour or more I used to spend staring at the ceiling. The pillow is part of that and not the whole of it. The street lamp by my window was the bigger problem, and a contoured sleep mask was the first thing that helped. Being too warm was the second, and this pillow is what addressed it.
There is nothing to plug in, charge or remember
No setting to learn, no routine to protect. I put it on the bed in March and it has been doing its job since. If you are the sort of person who starts a wind-down routine and abandons it by week two, a pillow is a low-risk place to begin, because you were going to lie down anyway. It is also the only thing in my bedroom that asks nothing of me in the morning.
What I'd Skip
I would skip buying a set if the person next to you is perfectly happy with their own pillow. Dale kept his, and I see no reason to spend on a second one before you know whether you like the first. I would skip the idea that a pillow replaces a doctor, too. If you are waking every night for weeks, or if your partner has told you that you stop breathing in the night, that is a conversation with a physician, not a bedding purchase. And skip expecting the word cooling to mean the room gets cooler. The cool surface of the pillow is real, but it cannot cool the air. In August, with the upstairs at 74 degrees, mine felt cool for a few minutes and then ordinary. It still helped. It just did not do the thing the name might lead you to expect, and I would rather you heard that from me than found it out in July.
The pillow is cool when I lie down and warm by morning. What changed is that being warm stopped being the reason I woke up.
If you wake up warm and lie there, start with the pillow
One standard QUTOOL pillow, shredded memory foam you can adjust, a cool silky side and a soft side, and a cover that goes in the machine. I have slept on mine every night since March.
Amazon Check Today's Price on Amazon →