Furniture
Pillows
A pillow is the cheapest thing in your bedroom and the one most likely to be the reason your neck hurts. The aisle sells GSM, gel infusions and the word orthopaedic. What decides whether you sleep well is height - and almost nobody labels it honestly.
Pillow reviews
How to choose a pillow in India
Almost every argument about pillows is really an argument about one number, and it is the number the listings are worst at. Loft - the height of the pillow under a loaded head - is what decides whether your neck spends the night in line with your spine or bent for seven hours. It depends on how you sleep and how broad you are across the shoulders, not on how expensive the pillow is. Read the one-star reviews on any contoured foam pillow and you will find the same sentence over and over: it made my neck worse. Almost always that is a person of one build sleeping on a pillow cut for another.
The second thing we weight is how long the height lasts, because that is where fibre and foam part company. Hollow-fibre pillows are cheap, washable and adjustable, and they pack down - owners describe them as fine for a few months and flat within a couple of years, at which point stuffing more fibre in makes them rigid rather than tall. Memory foam holds its height far longer, and the owners in this category with five- and eight-year-old pillows are all sleeping on foam. It pays for that with a rubbery smell in the first week, a surface that cannot be washed, and a firmness that is wrong for you permanently if you choose the wrong height.
The third thing is peculiar to this aisle and worth knowing before you trust any star rating on it. Bedding listings on Amazon India pool reviews across variants and, in several cases we checked, across entirely different products - one hotel-style pillow pair carried a review pool that was mostly Americans discussing a full-length body pillow. Open the reviews before you believe the rating, and if the buyers are talking about a different object, so is the rating.