As someone who tests mattresses for a living, I’ve often wondered if I could guess the mattress blindfolded, relying solely on the feel of the bed. With years of experience and over 200 mattresses meticulously evaluated, my team and I have honed our mattress senses to an extraordinary degree.
Using an eye mask, I relied on my finely tuned instincts and knowledge to distinguish the subtle nuances between the mattresses I guessed.
Read more: Best Mattress
The rules of the game
Since this was my first time ever trying to identify mattresses blindfolded, we decided to make the rules to this game fairly generous (so we can try it again with harder rules in the future).
First, the team picked 10 beds that I would be trying to identify. I didn’t select any of them but I did know which beds I would be testing beforehand. The team chose some of our favorite and most popular mattresses.
I was sequestered in a small side room of our office while the team swapped mattresses into our bedroom set. Once the bed was set up on our foundation, I donned the sleep mask, and Jon led me to the mattress to see if I could guess which one it was.
I went into the challenge feeling confident I could successfully identify all 10 mattresses without any trouble. I felt this way mostly because I knew which beds I’d be selecting from: there was a wide variety of construction types with a mix of all-foam beds, hybrid beds, memory foam beds and pillow-top beds. It helped that I’m super familiar with the design of the covers of the mattresses we test. I also knew I’d be able to feel the cover design and the top foam layers, which made me think I’d be able to guess each one easily.
The only beds I was a little worried about were the Helix Midnight, Leesa Original and Casper Original because the feels of those beds are pretty nondescript compared to the rest.
I took notes after testing each bed, which gave me the opportunity to change my guess before locking my answers in, but I didn’t need it.
Check out the video below to see the whole experience. I will cover a few of the notable mattresses in this article.
Video: CNET’s Sleep Expert Guesses Mattresses Completely Blindfolded
Results
Helix Midnight
The first bed the team decided to put in the bedroom was the Helix Midnight mattress, one of the beds I thought might trip me up. I was able to feel the coils immediately and because the Helix Midnight has a slight hint of memory foam, I could quickly figure out it wasn’t any other of the hybrid beds on the list.
Purple Original
Bed no. 3 in the challenge was the Purple Original, which should have been the easiest one to identify because of the unique feel of the Purple Gel-Flex Grid. For the first few seconds I wasn’t able to figure out which mattress it was, and I think this is in large part because I slept on Purple for so many years it doesn’t feel as distinct to me as it does to others.
I was still able to figure it out without much trouble, but it just took a few seconds longer than myself and the team expected.
Casper Original
Bed no. 6 was the Casper Original, which I knew would probably be the hardest to identify because the Leesa Original was also in the challenge and those two beds feel similar.
I initially thought it was Leesa but I was able to figure out it was Casper, mostly due to the design of the cover. Another hint is that the Casper has a zoned support design and I was able to feel the slight difference in firmness in the center third of the mattress.
Leesa Original
The last bed was the Leesa Original. With the Casper Original out of the way, and it being the last of the bunch, I was confident it was the Leesa Original before even touching the mattress.
The team did try to trip me up by reversing the orientation of the bed so I couldn’t easily feel the horizontal striping pattern on the cover of Leesa, but I could still tell those stripes were there.
DreamCloud Premier Hybrid
We had decided early on that if the challenge was deemed “too easy” the team would pick any of our mattresses as the eleventh bed to see if I could get it.
DreamCloud has recently updated its mattress lineup, bringing its total number of beds to six with the DreamCloud Mattress, the DreamCloud Premier and the Dreamcloud Premier Rest with a hybrid and a foam version of each.
The cover on all the DreamCloud beds is easy to identify thanks to its luxurious, tufted design, but it wasn’t easy to identify which of the six it was. It took me a little time but I was able to figure out the mattress had coils, which narrowed down the options to three. I also considered the new firmness profiles of the updated DreamCloud beds: The DreamCloud Premier is the one that sits right in the middle, and this bed felt like it was around a medium.
So it took me a bit longer to identify the “wildcard” mattresses compared to the other 10, but I still got it right.
What I learned
One thing I was curious about, going into this challenge, was just how different the mattresses feel. It’s easy to tell the difference between a Saatva Classic and the WinkBed when you can see all the visual design elements. But when you take that away, are they really that different?
Well, I can confidently say now that there are noticeable differences between the beds based solely on feel. How much the differences matter for sleepers on a nightly basis will vary from person to the person. I wouldn’t necessarily say that one mattress is objectively more comfortable than the rest, but there are noticeable differences, even when blindfolded.
The other thing I learned was that if we try this again we need to make the rules harder. The next person who takes the challenge may not know what any of the beds will be beforehand. Wearing gloves to not be able to feel the details of the cover would also make it much more difficult.
Overall it was a fun experience where I got to put my mattress knowledge to the test and my confidence was well warranted. I will try this again in the future with other team members and harder rules.
