I Tried the Famous NIGHT Pillow, and OMG, It’s Amazing

I’ve always been a sleep person—as in, I’m one of those people who feels like they need 10 hours a night to fully function and was ridiculed in their freshman dorm for their 9:30 p.m. high school bedtime (hey, classes started early back then!). In addition to always needing a lot of sleep, though, I’ve been fortunate that I can generally 1) fall asleep pretty quickly, no matter the circumstance, and 2) sleep through the entire night (unlike my poor mother, who seems to wake up at the drop of a pin).

While I’m lucky that I can sleep well in most places (and my default response to stress is to sleep more, not less!), I have become fairly picky about my bed setup when I’m at home. My find a pillow that I consider to be just as great. For the past few years, I’ve slept on a foam pillow, per the advice of a massage therapist I once visited—she noted that my neck would likely feel much better if I slept on a more firm, elevated pillow rather than a traditional fluffy one. The pillow has been great, though I usually stack it either above or below one of its fluffy counterparts for added comfort throughout the night.

All was well and good until a few months ago, when I heard about the famous NIGHT pillow. Priced at $150, it promises “better hair, better skin, and better sleep,” according to its tagline. Of course, I was curious. Was this extremely pricey pillow going to be so much better than my foam Amazon Prime option? What was all of the fuss about, and does the pillow actually live up to the hype?

I’ve now slept on the NIGHT pillow for the past week and a half, and let me tell you, this thing works. Case in point: After coming home from work and opening the package around 6 p.m. the day it arrived, I promptly fell asleep on the pillow for an hour and a half (oops!). The black pillowcase is silky and smooth (like, so, so smooth), so you don’t need to worry about the scratchiness or discomfort that can come into play with certain fabrics.

The pillow itself is the right amount of both soft and firm: I don’t feel the need to layer it with a fluffier pillow to feel cozy, but it also props my head up more than a normal pillow would. The black pillowcase is also supposed to serve as a sleep mask of sorts, but as someone whose room gets a lot of sunlight in the morning, Mother Nature still wins in waking me up. However, I wasn’t interested in the pillow for this purpose, and the overall comfort it provides is more than worthwhile.

It’s too soon to tell whether or not the pillow is actually helping improve my hair and skin (the silk is said to prevent bedhead and split ends, while the foam and pillowcase are said to work together to fight allergens). According to Dr. Ararsh Vijay Mudgil of Mudgil Dermatology in New York, these claims are a little iffy, anyway.

“These pillows certainly are luxurious,” Dr. Mudgil says. “Unfortunately, there’s really no proven benefit that using a silk pillow helps prevent wrinkles or promotes healthier hair. That being said, cotton is more absorbent than silk and can therefore hold onto irritants (like those found in some hair care products); for this reason, silk may be a better overall choice for those with sensitive skin.”

All in all, I will say that I’ve looked forward to going to sleep that much more since NIGHT has come into my life. Lying down on this perfectly soft, supportive pillow at the end of a long day has made my bedtime experience that much better and has made any nap much, much more difficult to wake up from.