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The Pillow Cure

By PENELOPE GREENFEB. 11, 2015

My neck is killing me. Isn’t yours? My shoulder hurts, too. Not always the same one, but always in the morning. Herniated disks, spinal stenosis, bone spurs: It’s a mess in there. As for the shoulders, one gave out with a horrible popping noise in a yoga class a few years ago; the cause of the other’s decay remains a (very dull) mystery.

These were the afflictions that sent me pillow shopping last week, and for which, on one particularly frigid evening, Saroya Garcia-Ladiana, a sales associate at Hastens, the Swedish mattress company, prescribed what she called “a whole-bed pillow cocktail.” Ms. Garcia-Ladiana, whose nickname is Soy, was not referring to the handful of Advil washed down with a Bud that would be my go-to palliative. It’s the relationship, she said, between my head, my bed and my pillow.

I had come to Hastens first because it is the purveyor of the $100,000 mattress, an artisanal object made from wool, horsetail hair, cotton and mohair. (Like condo sales topping $100 million, this number sets a benchmark for a certain kind of lunatic luxury purchase.) And I knew I would find a pillow there to elevate the whole category.

For years, the standard pillow for those with neck issues has been a crudely formed foam number, which is about as sexy as the cervical collar that is its daytime mate. Orthopedic bedding is not a style you want to cleave to, at least not for any length of time. You can’t mask an orthopedic pillow in a hand-blocked print from John Robshaw, and its skate-park-like contours throw the armada of the “dressed bed” into disarray.

Hastens Anatomical Pillow is an unlovely name for a pretty object. At least, it comes with a case made from the company’s signature blue-and-white check.

It is made of down and feathers, and shaped like a padded O, or a Leigh Bowery headdress (yes, I did stuff my head into it later). Inside the O is a pocket into which you slip a neck bolster, made from the same proportion — 15 to 85 percent — of down to feathers.

For side or back sleepers like me, the bolster-end of the pillow is designed to fit under your neck and support its natural curve.

Ms. Garcia-Ladiana had me unwrap myself from all my layers so she could see my neck, and led me gently to what she said was Hastens’s best seller, the 2000T ($38,000). “This is a medium-tension bed,” she said, “that’s really great for side sleepers.”

Tucking the pillow under my head, she traced my spine from mid-back to my hairline with her fingers to make sure it was straight. My shoulders unscrunched, my eyelids fluttered. Reader, I went home with a $330 pillow.

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These are boom times for the luxury bedding business. Hastens has been expanding exponentially, having opened two new stores in Manhattan last year; now there are four locations in the city where you can buy a mattress that costs more than your car, and another Hastens store is to open in two weeks in Greenwich, Conn.

But entire fortunes are being made in pillows, too. Consider the success of the My Pillow founder, Michael J. Lindell, a Minnesota-born former cocaine addict and inventor whose chopped-foam-stuffed pillows, which sell for about $50, brought in more than $100 million in sales in 2012, according to The Star Tribune of Minneapolis.

No doubt you’ve seen his infomercial. He, too, had neck issues. He, like you, would “flip-flop all night long like a guppy,” as he puts it, until he developed his patented pillow filler, a stew of interlocking foam chunks.

There are a few data sets to roughly gauge the size of the market for a product that would address the sleep/pain nexus. In 2012, according to a survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics, and made available by the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons last week, 14 percent of adult Americans said they had neck pain within a three-month period; in 2010, another N.C.H.S. survey noted that there were more than 10 million visits to doctors’ offices for complaints related to neck pain.

As it turns out, said Dr. Robert Gotlin, director of orthopedic and sports rehabilitation at Mount Sinai Beth Israel, we are designed for failure.

“The fact is, from age 25 on, this process of failure begins,” he continued cheerfully. “The analogy is this: You go to a bowling alley and you hold a bowling ball over your head, and what happens is your arms gets tired. Basically, your head is that 18-pound ball. And over time, two things happen: your muscles get sore and your disks wear out. Or you get arthritis. We’re all going to wind up with at least one of these conditions at the same time we are still holding up this 18-pound object. I, like you, would love to go to bed and wake up without feeling any pain.”

As far as pillows are concerned, he said: “The real answer is, there is no answer. Foam or any of these pillows with the divots, the cutout supports, these are marketing items that have their own research attached that supports their claims. The best advice is to just pick one that feels good. The pillow should basically be one that keeps your head over your shoulders. Rather than spend all this money on the fancy things, see what’s comfortable. That could be the cheapest one.”

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At the Clean Bedroom in Brooklyn Heights, which sells organic bedding (natural latex and no-genetically-modified-organism cotton sheets, for example, in beige tones) and eco-friendly bedroom furniture like dressers made from sustainable maple from the parlor floor of a brownstone building, Luis Camejo was explaining the niceties of grain-filled pillows. He was trying to locate a millet-hull one for me.

Grains are good for support, he said, and because millet is a smaller grain than buckwheat, it’s less noisy — less crunchy — if you move around when you sleep. But he was sold out of the millet, and so were his company’s six other stores. It turned out that the seamstress at Sachi Organics, which makes the pillows, had a pinched nerve and was a week behind on their orders. Now that’s kind of ironic.

“I’m an English major,” Mr. Camejo said. “So I’m not sure of the correct meaning of irony.”

How does an English major get into the bedding business?

“Craigslist,” he said, as he rang up a buckwheat pillow ($80) and a shredded organic rubber contour pillow covered in beige wool ($199).

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Coco-Mat, on Mercer Street, directly opposite Andre Balazs’s solemn, Jean Nouvel-designed glass castle, is a Greek organic bedding store that sells mattresses made from layers of coconut fibers, seaweed, cotton, wool and natural rubber. You could probably eat them, if times were tough.

The main precept here is a sort of D.I.Y. bed: mattresses and pillows are made from zippered pockets stuffed with plant materials you can add to or remove. I was put to bed with slippers, a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice and a hand towel that Alisha Hylton, director of sales for Coco-Mat North America, spread over the Sithon VIII pillow (names here are derived from Greek mythology).

Coco-Mat makes 12 kinds of pillows in various architectural styles and fillings, and a computer program on an iPad helps you figure out the one for you. Ms. Hylton said she used to measure her customers’ necks and shoulder spans with a ruler until a small child broke it; now she just eyeballs them.

The Sithon VIII ($316) had a bolster and a central pouch filled with seaweed, rubber and eucalyptus leaves. It comes with a bottle of eucalyptus oil and squares of linen you dollop with oil, then stick in that central pouch. I wasn’t eager to sleep in a fog of eucalyptus — it was too medical an aroma for bed — so Ms. Hylton added another, plainer model, the Sithon I ($117).

None of the bedding is returnable, but in Europe you can try Coco-Mat’s beds and pillows free, said Mike Efmorfidis, the company’s chief executive officer, at a two-night stay at one of their hotels. “I can’t offer you that here,” he said. “But you can sign up to sleep in the suite downstairs. Though not right now, because it’s occupied.”

Someone is sleeping under us right now?

“Ah, he’s up now, he just passed by,” Mr. Efmorfidis said.

Siestas in the suite, Ms. Hylton added, come complete with pillows and fresh linens. Customers typically choose two- or three-hour sessions, she said. It is perhaps a sign of the times that you can now find a bed by the hour, and just sleep in it.