PillowFacts

PillowFacts / About

How this site decides what to tell you

PillowFacts is an independent index of pillow fit. It exists because the question 'which pillow' is almost always answered with a list of products, when the answer is a measurement — and because the specification that decides it is the one most makers do not publish.

Who runs it

It is run by one person, working alone, with no professional credential in sleep, medicine or ergonomics and none claimed anywhere on the site. That is stated plainly because it changes how you should read everything here: this is not expertise, it is arithmetic and sourcing, both of which you can check. Where a question needs a clinician, the site says so and stops.

The rules it holds itself to

Every specification comes from the maker's own page

Not from a review site, a retailer listing, or an aggregator. Each figure carries the URL it came from and the date it was read. Where a maker publishes nothing, the field is shown as absent rather than estimated — and an absence is often the most useful thing on a page.

The arithmetic is published, not just its output

Required loft = neck-to-shoulder distance minus mattress sink. That model is on the method page with its assumptions, its failure cases, and the check that keeps it honest: it outputs roughly 4 to 6.5 inches for typical adults, and side-sleeper pillows cluster at 5 to 6. It was not tuned to agree — the agreement is the evidence.

Testing is reported with its sample size, including when that is one

The headline verdict on this site rests on a single person's experience and says so, with the four things nobody wrote down listed as gaps on the page rather than filled in. Google's own guidance asks how many products were tested and how; a page that quietly omitted that would be doing the opposite.

Derived numbers are labelled as derived

Where the site infers something — such as which bodies a fixed-loft result can transfer to — it is marked 'derived, not measured' and the derivation is shown. A build check fails if that label is ever removed.

This is geometry, never medicine

Several situations covered here are medical. On every one of them the treating clinician governs, the site describes only what a position or a device does to pillow height, and no condition is diagnosed, treated or named as treatable. A build check scans every page for unnegated medical claims and has stopped publication more than once.

Contradictions are printed, not smoothed

Where a maker's own page disagrees with itself — a trial stated two different ways, a depth given as both 6 cm and 1.8 inches — the site prints the contradiction rather than picking the friendlier number.

How it makes money

The site carries advertising, and product links may in future earn a commission. Neither has ever determined what is written: the specifications are read from makers' pages before any commercial relationship exists, absences are published whether or not they flatter a product, and the pillow this site rates most highly for its own author's situation is one whose maker makes no claim about that use at all. If a commercial arrangement ever changes a page, that will be said on the page.

Corrections

Specifications change and pages go stale. Every figure carries its read-date so you can see how old it is. If something here is wrong, say so in the Discord — corrections are made to the dataset, which rebuilds every page that used the figure, and there is no way to quietly fix one page and leave another disagreeing. The Discord is here.

What it will not do

The method in full → · How a pillow gets tested → · Ask for a situation →