You can buy just about anything off the internet, even beds. The new bed-in-a-box phenomenon has been picking up steam lately. Beds are very personal, made to last, and most believe should be tested before purchasing. In this review, we compare Leesa versus Purple to see which one gives you the most for the money.
Comparison Table
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Mattress Test Reviews: Leesa VS Purple
With online sales soaring and brick-and-mortar stores closing, there is virtually no limit to what you can buy on the internet. E-commerce started out small but has now become all-encompassing, allowing consumers to buy everything from the comfort of their own couch. The mattress manufacturers and retailers are no exception. There are a variety of companies purporting to sell and ship you a bed in a box, usually a foam product that can be shipped from a virtual marketplace to your front door in days. Today, we give you a review of two such products: Leesa versus Purple beds.
All-Foam Mattresses Primarily Sold Online
It only makes sense that the most popular bed in a box is foam. Foam beds are popular for many reasons, but particularly so for online retailers. They can be compressed down to the size of a small box and shipped anywhere in the world. Once opened, they will return to normal bed size and voila! You have a queen-size bed that magically appeared!Foam mattresses are becoming the hottest-selling kind of bed in the world. While not all available are all foam, some are considered hybrids, which are a combination of foam and coil technology. This gives you the best of both worlds: the health benefits of a foam mattress plus the support and feel of a coil.
Why Should You Consider a Foam Mattress?
1. Increased Circulation and Alignment Without the Bounce
First, we need to clarify what we mean by foam. There are many types of foam in the world. The one we will be referring to here is memory foam. That is a type of polyurethane material that is known for its ability to mold to a person and then return to its original shape and size (that’s why the bed-in-a-box concept works). Memory foam is also known for promoting the following three key health benefits:
It keeps your spine in line. Memory foam is one way to ensure your spine is in the correct position while you sleep. This helps eliminate back stiffness in the mornings. This also means you stay in a comfortable position longer, which in turn means you don’t toss and turn quite so much.
It promotes increased blood flow. Beds with memory foam are pressure positive and respond to the shape and weight of your particular body type. Unlike other coil and pillow-top beds, foam will mold to you specifically as you sleep. If someone else gets on your side of the bed, it will mold to them as well. The pressure-positive attributes mean that you won’t have circulation cut off by stiff sleeping. Things like waking up with a dead arm are all but eliminated.
You won’t feel your partner moving. If your partner tends to toss and turn to the point of making you feel sea sick, a memory foam bed will put an end to it. How? For starters, by keeping your partner’s spine in alignment and blood flowing properly, the body won’t be trying so hard to get comfortable in the middle of the night. Second, memory foam has a nifty side effect of not transferring motion across the surface. Unlike coils that give and bounce, foam is dense and won’t. Your partner could be turning somersaults at 1 a.m. and you won’t feel it.
2. Memory Foam Isn’t Perfect
People tend to sleep hot in foam beds. This is because the dense material, responsible for keeping your back in alignment, and your blood circulating retain heat. As you sleep, your body releases heat into the bed. The foam absorbs the heat and keeps it hanging right there at the surface. That in turn heats you up, and you wind up kicking blankets off or tossing and turning. The only way to really be free of the heat is to get up and allow it to cool down. Since you aren’t doing that at 3 a.m., you keep being hot. You then tell everyone you know that your bed makes you hot.
Luckily, however, manufacturers are making great strides in combating the heat-retention issue. There are new technologies such as cooling foam, and even the way the beds are layered helps shed the heat. Both the Leesa and the Purple beds purport to have solved the sleeping hot issue, but in different ways.
The Leesa Beds
The company behind Leesa started out because the founders wanted to develop a bed that everyone could sleep on. No matter what your sleeping style, shape or size, they wanted to make a mattress that would work for you. Leesa keeps things simple and only sells online. It has two different styles of mattress for you to choose from: the Leesa and the Sapira. Below we break them both down.
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We’ve unwrapped the bed and listed the components in order from top to bottom:
- Plush cover.
- Two inches of exclusive Avena cooling top layer – This is a patented layer of what we can only gather is some kind of cooling fibers or foam.
- Two inches of memory foam.
- Six inches of a base support core foam.
- This comes out to be 4 inches of higher-quality materials. The 6-inch core is just there to add height to the mattress.
- It isn’t made of anything that helps cool the mattress.
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The components in order from top to bottom:
- Plush cover
- One and a half inches of Avena cooling top layer
- One and a half inches of memory foam
- One inch stabilizing foam
- One thousand-plus individually wrapped pocketed springs
- One inch stabilizing foam
- This equates to about 3 inches of high-quality material that you’re going to feel. The pocket-spring core is much more supportive than the foam foundation of the previous bed, but some motion transfer occurs with the springs.
The Main Components of the Leesa Beds
The top two layers of both the Leesa and the Sapira are made with Leesa’s patented Avena cooling top layer and memory foam. These are the only two components the beds share. The Leesa is an all-foam bed while the Sapira is a hybrid. The Sapira purports to be the best of both worlds like most hybrids with promises of more air flow than an all-foam mattress.
The Potential Issues With the Leesa Beds
While the Leesa company is founded on the principal that its beds fit everyone, we didn’t like that there was no selection in comfort. For example, some people prefer a softer feel. There are memory-foam and hybrid beds that come in a softer feel. On the flipside, if you are someone who tends to enjoy a firmer mattress, how do you know one of these will give it to you long term? These are the potential issues we have with most bed-in-a-box mattresses.
The Purple Beds
The Purple bed boasts a patented material made of hyper-elastic polymer. The reason for the polymer is it sheds heat quicker. The honeycomb-shaped grid allows air to easily flow in and out. It purports to be a zero-transfer surface, and it molds your body’s pressure points to provide support where you really need it.
The pressure technology is revolutionary, and the honeycomb material is made to be what’s called “pressure neutral.” Foam is pressure negative, and as it heats up it softens causing you to sink into it more. Latex is pressure positive and doesn’t really give you a proper spinal alignment.
The pressure technology of the Purple gives you the pressure relief on an ongoing basis. Because it doesn’t heat up, you stay more buoyant while getting the spinal alignment and pressure relief you need to get a good night’s sleep.
Like the Leesa, Purple has two model beds. Let’s take a look at them below.
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The components in order from top to bottom:
- Stretch knit cover
- Two-inch smart comfort grid or honeycomb of hyper-elastic polymer – exclusively patented
- Three and a half-inch comfort layer of high density, responsive and soft foam
- Four-inch support core
- This adds up to being approximately 5.5 inches of high-quality materials.
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The components in order from top to bottom:
- Stretch knit cover.
- Your choice of a 2-inch, 3-inch or 4-inch smart comfort grid – you get to choose the type of comfort level you like to sleep on: firm, plush or soft.
- Seven and a half-inch pocketed coils made from 95 percent recycled steel – used to support and reinforce the mattress.
- Surrounding the coils is a thin, durable polyurethane-foam layer which helps provide support and even weight distribution over and under the coils.
- Much like the Sapira, the New Purple is a hybrid. The bed is constructed using Purple’s patented hyper-elastic polymer material in addition to the coils.
- The polymer material reinforces the top layers of material, affording you more comfort and support as you sleep. The honeycomb material and construction of the inner workings of the bed guarantee you won’t sleep hot.
The Potential Issues With the Purple Beds
We believe the biggest challenge either Purple bed faces is the strange look it has. The Purple polyurethane material may be ground breaking and may have been tested repeatedly and perfected for over 20 years, but the bottom line is people don’t think it looks appealing. It appears as if it would be uncomfortable to sleep on. Do you feel like you’re sleeping on Jell-O, or is it more like rubber mulch? We believe this unknown component is what makes the Purple bed difficult to try.
There is one bright factor in this potential issue. Purple has a partnership with Mattress Firm. Some stores have the beds on their floor so you can try them before you buy them. This is, no doubt, in response to people’s hesitation at trying the product at high prices.
What We Think
While reviewing these beds, we took a lot of factors into consideration. We looked at the reviews and even looked into some other bed-in-a-box products. The reality is while these products may be convenient to purchase and many companies offer great trial periods, the good reviews don’t seem to last long term. This can be attributed to a one-size-fits-all mentality shared by the Leesa and Purple products. While we understand memory foam shifts and shapes to the user, we also found that people like to sleep on varying degrees of firm and soft beds. Even memory foam beds can be softer or firmer and still retain the health benefits. Only Purple offers a choice in firmness in the New Purple bed. These beds are also available in some stores, so you have the opportunity to try them out before purchasing them. Even with great trial periods, the fact is when you have to send a bed back, you are without a bed.
In the battle between Leesa and Purple, while it is difficult to choose a winner, we chose the Purple beds. We believe, after researching the cooling measures and materials in several different beds, that the Purple material, while strange to look at, does appear to stay cool and give you all the benefits of memory foam without the heat. While we did like the idea of the Leesa hybrid, we are just not convinced that the comfort level is there when you can’t choose the type of mattress firmness. We would really like to see more choices in bed-in-a-box products. The return rate may be lower if people are offered the chance to choose.
The Choice Is Yours
Purchasing a bed should be a personal decision, and if you choose to purchase one without trying it, know that it is going to feel great at first. After all, you aren’t buying a new bed because your old bed feels wonderful. Be prepared, though, for that loving feeling to fade quickly if you don’t have a choice in the firmness of your bed. While the Leesa is a high-caliber contender in this mattress battle, it doesn’t give you the ability to choose if you want to fall into a softer bed. The choice, as they say, is yours.
Last update on 2023-06-09 at 19:23 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API
