Emma Luxe Cooling mattress review: Could it help us beat the night-time sweats?

Setup, design and features

As with many bed-in-a-box mattresses, the Emma luxe cooling mattress comes rolled up in a cardboard box like a plastic-wrapped Swiss roll. Upon delivery, unroll the mattress onto your bed frame. Now, one word of caution, this mattress is super heavy, so you’ll want to enlist the help of another person to lift it out of the box and onto your frame (unless you’re either very brave or very strong).

There’s a cutter in the box, but we don’t recommend cutting the plastic open until you have the mattress in the correct position. Once a tiny cut appears, the mattress will start to inflate like a runaway train. You won’t be able to get it back into its thin vacuum-packed state.

Emma says that its mattresses take about five hours to inflate fully. Once it does, we were free to sleep on it as we liked – no waiting for 24 hours as with other brands. The slight off-gassing scent stuck around for roughly a week with the windows open during the day, but it wasn’t totally unpleasant or disruptive to our sleep.

Emma also has an optional £45 old mattress removal service if it’s a bother to get your current mattress recycled. The luxe cooling comes with a 200-night trial too and there’s a 10-year warranty included.

Materials

The Emma luxe cooling mattress has six layers. The first two are responsible for regulating temperature, while the bottom four help with comfort and support. The breathable top cover is removable, featuring “open-pore fibres” that pull and release the air from your body to help keep your body temperature even as you sleep.

The second layer is where most of the magic happens. The first of four foam layers, it features Emma’s patented ThermoSync tech, meaning it’s infused with graphite particles. Graphite has been used in computers and smartphones for years thanks to its ability to absorb and pull heat away from electronics (and particularly batteries). Graphite’s also super soft, so utilising it into the design of a mattress just makes sense.

You then have a layer of memory foam to help the mattress mould to your body; a third supportive foam layer to help with spinal alignment; a layer of12cm “Aeroflex” pocket springs to help with breathability and pressure relief; then lastly, a final base layer of foam, which helps keep your spine fully aligned as you toss and turn through the night.

Comfort and heat regulation

First of all, temper your expectations. This isn’t going to be like sleeping inside a chest freezer with the door shut. Although the surface felt cool to the touch and seemed to dissipate heat when we placed our hands on it, sleeping in a 30C heatwave remained a challenge. We still woke up sweaty and miserable.

But if you’re a night-time sweater even when the temperature is less severe, you’ll really feel the benefits. Once the heat curtailed and we were experiencing temperatures between 15C and 22C (heat when we’d ordinarily still sweat), we still felt cool and comfortable. Our body wasn’t overheating, and we didn’t have to pop our legs out of the duvet all the time to get some respite from the warmth. It really did work in less extreme temperatures.

Even when the temperature dropped to around 5C overnight, we didn’t find ourselves overcooling either. Our body temperature always remained regular and manageable. We could finally sleep without having to worry about the night-time sweats.

As for comfort? It took a few nights to get used to the softer mattress – it’s not as firm as the Simba hybrid pro, which we’d been sleeping on for years prior, but a couple of weeks in, and we couldn’t imagine sleeping on anything else. It’s extremely comfortable, moulding to our body whatever position we took. Emma rates the mattress’s firmness as a medium. We thought it was softer than that, while other testers in our family thought it was firmer than a medium. Your mileage may vary here, but it was a lot softer than the firmer Simba hybrid pro, which is also rated as a medium.

As a back sleeper, who also likes to sleep on their side, the Emma luxe was just about right. The weight of our partner next to us never disrupted our sleep, even when they rolled over. We never felt a dip or sag as they moved.

One thing to note for side sleepers is that the edge support isn’t great. We found ourselves sinking a little bit off the bed if we edged too far. Even when we sat too close to the edge of the bed, we’d find ourselves sliding off due to the lack of edge support. Our body began to learn from this, and we started sitting deeper into the mattress off the side and not sleeping so close to the edge, but it’s still something to consider.