I’ve Owned This Mattress for 8 Years, and I’d Buy It Again — But Not Yet

I bought my current mattress in another era. It was early 2017, and my son and I had just moved into a new place with my then-boyfriend (now-husband). His mattress, an ancient, pokey, box-spring nightmare, had to go. So we embarked on a new mattress shopping journey. This journey involved passionate debates and spreadsheets and led us eventually to the Original Bear mattress.

Bear was one of a handful of new direct-to-consumer mattress brands that had sprung up back then. They advertised their mattress as especially supportive for athletes. Am I an athlete? Definitely not. But at the time we were both doing CrossFit and, speaking for myself, I was waking up every morning feeling like a bag of broken glass. Bear promised its specially-formulated mattress would help us recover from giving it 110% in the gym.

It also promised to be cooling — which is important to my husband, who sleeps hot — and not soon enough for me, as I was on the verge of perimenopause at the time. And it came with an eco-friendly certification so we wouldn’t feel like we were sleeping on a big block of poison night after night.

How did the Bear mattress deliver? Well, I’ll put it this way. We’re still sleeping on it eight years later, and I’m hoping to get another two years out of it before we replace it. Did I mention that it’s also a couple hundred dollars cheaper now than when I first bought it? Read on and learn more.

The main features of Bear’s Original mattress are as follows:

• Two options for a breathable mattress cover
• A cooling layer that draws heat away from your body
• More layers that provide support, stability, and pressure relief
• Little to no chemical emissions

The Original mattress has two cover options: The “breathable weave” cover comes standard, or you can upgrade to a “Celliant Infused Cover with Sleep Recover Technology(™).” Celliant is the brand name of a synthetic fiber that contains thermo-reactive minerals and trace elements. It’s supposed to absorb body heat and convert it into a kind of infrared energy, which in turn is believed to enhance the dilation of blood vessels, improving your blood circulation (more oxygen to your muscles to help them recover).

The first layer after that has cooling gel memory foam. It doesn’t add coolness so much as it helps draw “unwanted” heat away from your body. (How does it know how much heat I want? Unclear.)

Like many mattresses on the market nowadays, Bear’s Original is designed with multiple layers serving different purposes in order to deliver the sweet spot between firm support and what I would describe as cradling-you-in-the-palm-of-a-benevolent-god softness. Mattress teamwork!  

That first cooling gel memory foam is also supposed to support spinal alignment. The “dynamic” foam layer below provides pressure relief and body compression as it contours around your shape. And a firmer layer below that is all about durability.

Finally, Bear’s mattresses are GREENGUARD Gold certified, a third-party certification that means the mattress gives off minimal chemical emissions. It’s also CertiPUR-US certified, which means it’s made without formaldehyde, ozone depleters, phthalates, mercury, lead, or other heavy metals. It’s low VOC and screened for carcinogenic chemicals.

First, a caveat: The Bear mattress I use today is not exactly the same as the Original version Bear sells currently. While the mattress remains 10 inches thick, they changed the two “responsive transition” middle foam layers into one, denser “dynamic transition” foam layer. They also changed the top graphite-infused gel memory layer into a gel memory foam layer. And they introduced the Celliant-infused cover option. 

The price is lower as well. In 2017 the mattress retailed for $850, and I got $50 from a promotion. Now the Original retails for $998, but it’s on sale for $649, or $742 with the Celliant infused cover.

We did appreciate that the mattress doesn’t get hot when we get hot. And eight years later, now that I’ve let my estrogen prescription lapse (long story) and I turn into a hot-flashing volcano every night, it still does a good job of dispersing all that heat. Is it literally cool to the touch, though? Not really. The first company to invent a mattress-sized frozen gel pack can have all of my money. 

I’m super interested in the Celliant infused cover. Honestly, I think it’s asking a lot for a mattress to help you recover from workouts — there are other, more effective ways to do that. But I’d be curious to try it out anyway. And if it wicks away even more heat, all the better.

One thing we agreed on when we were looking at mattresses is that we wanted something firm with just a wee bit of give. I think we have both the dynamic foam layer and the high-density support foam layer to thank for the very minimal motion transfer in our mattress. My husband likes to roll around like a rhinoceros in the savanna before falling asleep, and I really appreciate that the whole bed doesn’t move around with him. 

In fact, I think it’s the structural integrity of the mattress that’s impressed me the most. After all these years, it’s still holding up for the most part. In the past year or so I’ve noticed the edges have gone a bit squishy. But the main part of the mattress still feels quite firm and steady. When I place my hand on the surface it leaves an imprint in the first layer that fades in a few seconds.

I’m very sensitive to smell, and I can’t sleep if I’m inhaling fumes from off-gassing furniture. I know it’s unrealistic to expect a mattress to do all this (waves at all the copy above) and be totally chemical-free. But it would be nice if those chemicals weren’t sending free radicals into my cells or making me feel nauseous. 

Straight out of the box the mattress smells like nothing. That’s exactly how I want my mattress to smell.

Buy: Bear Original Mattress, $649 for a Queen, $742 with Celliant Infused cover