The miracle of nanotechnology brings us the aromatherapy mattress, such as Magniflex’s Lavender Comfort ($1,899 queen). But there are several makers and several available scents to be woven into the fabric of where you sleep: vanilla, rose, green tea and chamomile, for starters. The more you lie on the bed, the more the scent capsules break, which guarantees years of odorous sleep.
— From Mattress makers try to lure us into bed with fragrance, soy and more at the Seattle Times.
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This would seriously clash with my bedtime perfume habit.
Well if you’re a fan of orientals maybe the vanilla mattress might enhance your experience.
Same here!
Given the huge bedbug problem, they should make mattresses that are mint or cedar scented.
Hey. That’s an idea…
Ugh. Don’t mention bedbugs, please… I listened to a long radio program on the subject and my skin is still crawling!
Yes, they are horrible. When my college aged daughter moved from an apartment to a house in Austin she got bedbugs. We wound up buying her a new bed and mattress set because she just couldn’t get rid of them. I think things like cedar and lavender are nice, but I don’t find them particularly useful as insect repellants. I am a professional knitter and have a HUGE stash of luxury yarns (I work and teach at a local yarn shop). I saw a moth – four letter word – one day and, after the panic subsided, I installed some of the cedar tiles you can buy if you are not lucky enough to have a built in cedar closet just for your yarn. Smells great, but I’ve seen too many moth eaten things that were stored in a cedar chest, so I then promptly sealed everything in those suitcase sized ziploc bags. I really don’t think that cedar or lavender on or in your bed is enough to combat something like bedbugs. Having said that, a friend of mine recently purchased one of these mattresses. I agree that I wouldn’t want to sleep on the same scent for years, but it is very comfy. Wouldn’t you become anosmic to it after a while anyway?
@ Julia – I believe you would definitely develop anosmia after a while. Years ago, I worked @ a florist and it got to the point where I couldn’t smell the flowers any more [which was a bummer] – so I think the situation would be similar.
Does mint or cedar really help with bed bugs? I work with homeless and low-income women, and it’s a huge problem in shelters and HUD housing.
Oy. Why not just shake a few drops of essential oil on the mattress when you change the sheets? (That’s what I do.)
Beats me. Personally I don’t want my bed to smell like anything.
“Years of odorous sleep” does not sound like something I want.
Yeah, it sounded more like “years of stinky sleep” to me, too. I had to check whether ‘odorous’ was generally a positive or negative word, and surprisingly, it is positive. But still.
Me neither.
Agreed. Anyway, I like to choose my own bedtime fragrance and it varies depending on my mood. I always put perfume on before bed. Is that weird? I’m sure I’m not the only one who does it.
Definitely not the only one who does it.
yup, I make a perfume selection every night just before bed!
Even if you liked the scent when you first buy the mattress, I know I’d be sick of it in mere weeks….then you wouldn’t be able to get away from it! Which would be horrible! And holy cow, I can’t imagine how bad it would be if you had a stomach bug and every little smell made you want to ‘ralph’…..sheeesh, I can’t imagine actually buying one of these!
Oh yes. A bedtime perfume is just as much a nightly ritual for me as brushing my teeth and washing my face.
It’s a great way to drift off to sleep.
I use vinegar when washing stubbornly and unpleasantly “odorous” items to tame the smell. It works really well. Our older Siamese expressed her displeasure over new kittens last year in a very disgruntled feline manner, and a good splash of vinegar right into the wash water took care of the problem when nothing else would. It also helps when scrubbing an affected area of carpeting when necessary.
Agreed on the laundry detergent. I do like really fragrant dish soaps however. There was a lovely berry-scented soap we used for quite a while, and I love a good lemon-scented dish soap as well.
It seems like sleeping on a vanilla scented mattress would either be the remedy or encouragement for a sweet tooth craving upon waking. Either I’d be so sick of the stuff that all sweets would sound unappealing, or it would slip into my dreams and I’d wake up craving rice pudding or some such.
Great! With my luck a vanilla scented mattress would cause me to gain 50lbs!! Maybe a celery scented mattress would help me lose a few…..(I’m an optimist)
Makes me wonder if I’ve been sleeping on a vanilla-scented mattress the past three years.
I was house/pet sitting at my brother & sister-in-law’s house last weekend. I sleep in their bed when I stay overnight – they have such a comfortable mattress! But my s-i-l had washed the sheets in a new lavender-heavy scented detergent (or maybe dryer sheet?) and I could *not* fall asleep because it made my head pound. I ended up sleeping on the couch.
I bet it was Tide Simple Pleasures Vanilla Lavender. The woman who owned our house used that fabric softener and after 5 months the washer *still*smells like it.
My husband bought some “fresh scent” detergent by Tide; I had to physically remove it from the house, it was so strong.
And the lavender-vanilla scent probably smells nothing like lavender, either. Remember the Chandler Burr article (April 2007) on lavender Febreeze? The less genuine lavender was in the scent, the more the testers identified it as lavender.
Whatever it was, just thinking about it provokes my gag-reflex!
I can vouch for the fact that Tide Pure Essentials in Lemon Verbena has the most stubborn staying power of any scented product I’ve ever used. And it smells nothing like lemon verbena.
I’ve always used unscented laundry detergent and have never used dryer sheets because I don’t like the water repellent coating feel of them. I also get migraines with olfactory issues and the thought of retreating to a bed that screams of one of these super-charged new fragrances they are coming up with these days nauseates me. The best scent for sheets is real line dried.
I mostly use unscented detergent too and I use a little bit of white vinegar to cut down on the static but I also have unscented dryer sheets for stuff like my polar fleece blankets, etc. If I want any kind of scent (which is rare) I use Mrs. Meyers detergent in Basil.
I love this bit of commentary in the original article:
“Still waiting on a Neapolitan mattress for those who can’t pick just one scent.”
Yes!
No, thanks — I’ve done a pretty good job myself of permeating my pillows with L’Air du Desert Marocain! The problem with these perma-scented products is that the scents are never MY idea of pleasant, relaxing, etc. Not to mention that beds aren’t only for relaxing
…
True enough…not likely you’ll find a mattress pre-scented with a Tauer
Hmmmm, no. Bad idea. Tonight’s rose-scented pillow shams will be tomorrow night’s something-different-scented pillow shams. Would prefer for my mattress to be odor-free, period.
Me too.