About 77,000 years ago, in a rock shelter at Sibudu in South Africa, people made their beds from sedges and rushes and topped them with aromatic leaves. The leaves contain chemicals that kill insects and their larvae. The oldest bed on record came treated against mosquitoes. Nobody asked whether it was organic.
The word came much later. Mattress goes back to the Arabic maṭraḥ, "something thrown down". Europeans picked up the habit of sleeping on cushions on the floor during the Crusades, and the word travelled with it through the Romance languages into English. For most of history the filling was straw, feathers or horsehair. By the first half of the 20th century a North American mattress was a core of springs padded with cotton, and foam came after that. Memory foam began in 1966, under a NASA contract to make aircraft seat cushions safer, and went by the name "temper foam". It was released to the public in the early 1980s and reached mattresses in 1991.
The mattress you sleep on today is treated too, with different chemicals and for a different reason. You spend about a third of your life on it, roughly 26 years if you live to 80, and for all of that time your face is a few centimetres from whatever it gives off.
Shops have an answer, and the answer is an organic mattress. Whether it is worth it depends on how the chemicals got into a mattress in the first place, what it releases, and what an organic label fixes.
Why foam got flame retardants
The story starts with a cigarette. In 1929, a fire started by one in Lowell, Massachusetts, caught the attention of a congresswoman, Edith Nourse Rogers, who asked the National Bureau of Standards for a cigarette less likely to start fires. By 1932 the bureau had one, a "self-snubbing" cigarette, and suggested that the makers take up the idea. None did.
In 1973, Congress set up the Consumer Product Safety Commission to deal with dangerous products. It made the commission responsible for flammable fabrics and kept tobacco out of its reach. The cigarette stayed as it was, and the furniture had to cope with it. That same year the mattress got its own test: a lit cigarette is laid on it, and the char may not spread more than 5 centimetres in any direction. By one later analysis, that test did cut the risk of mattress fires.
Sofas came next. In 1975 California brought in Technical Bulletin 117, which holds a burning cigarette against the fabric and foam of upholstered furniture for 45 minutes to see whether they catch, and makers across the United States and Canada followed it. It was easier to fireproof the sofa than the smoker. The foam came to carry flame retardants, among them a family of chemicals called PBDEs. When 102 American couches bought between 1985 and 2010 were tested, 85% had flame retardants in their foam. After the main PBDE mixture was phased out in 2005, the most common one became TDCPP, a suspected human carcinogen, found in 52% of the couches bought from then on. In 2007 mattresses got a second federal test, this time with an open flame, which limits how big a fire a mattress can make over 30 minutes.
When states later tried to restrict those chemicals, a group called Citizens for Fire Safety argued against them, with burn experts testifying about children hurt in fires. In 2012 the Chicago Tribune showed that the group was a front for the companies that make flame retardants, funded with about $17 million between 2008 and 2010. Fire safety, it turns out, had a sales department. One burn expert's story of a baby burned on a pillow without flame retardants turned out to be invented. When the newspaper had baby mattresses tested that year, three brands carried toxic flame retardants.
California banned two of the PBDEs from 2008 and rewrote its furniture rule as TB117-2013, which no longer relies on flame retardants. All the commercial PBDEs are now marked for elimination under an international treaty. They have not left the house. They are still in older foam, and house dust supplies 80% to 90% of the PBDEs people take in. Some of them affect thyroid hormone levels.
Getting rid of the foam works. In California homes that replaced older upholstered furniture, or only its foam, with flame-retardant-free versions, every flame retardant measured in the dust fell in nearly all of them over the next 18 months. Seven childcare centres in Seattle did the same with the children's foam nap mats, and four flame retardants in their dust fell by 90%, 79%, 65% and 42%.
The cigarette did get fixed in the end. New York passed the first law requiring fire-safe cigarettes in 2000, Canada set the first national standard in 2005, and by August 2011 every US state and Washington DC had followed. The European standard took effect in November 2011, nearly eighty years after the 1932 cigarette.
What a mattress gives off
The other chemicals are the gases. In a test of 20 crib mattresses, every one of them gave off volatile organic compounds. Warming the mattresses from room temperature, 23 °C, to the temperature of a sleeping body, 36 °C, raised the emissions about two and a half times. New mattresses gave off more than used ones, and polyurethane foam released a wider mix of chemicals than polyester foam.
Then the testers laid a heated model of a baby on a mattress. The air at its nose carried 1.8 to 2.4 times the level in the rest of the room. The bed puts the source right under your face and then warms it up.
Mattress fabric gives off more when it is warm, too. When 17 samples of it were heated to 50 °C, to mimic a heated room in winter, polyurethane released by far the most of a solvent called dimethylformamide, about nine times as much as polyester. Warming the samples from 25 to 50 °C raised the release of formamide and other harmful gases.
That fits the worry the old version of this article started with. The US Environmental Protection Agency says some indoor pollutants are often 2 to 5 times their outdoor levels, and Americans spend about 90% of their time indoors. The bedroom is where you spend the longest unbroken stretch of it.
Since new mattresses give off the most, the first weeks matter most. Unwrap a new one in a room with the window open, and let it air before you sleep on it. How to Make Your Home Smell Fresh Without Air Fresheners has why the open window beats anything sprayed into the room.
What an organic label means
An organic label on a mattress is usually a certificate for its fabric or its latex. The best known for fabric, the Global Organic Textile Standard, follows the fibre from the farm through every step of processing, and every company in the chain has to be certified by an independent body. What it certifies is how the cotton or the wool was grown and handled.
Organic cotton has a real case on the farm. Cotton covers 2.5% of the world's cultivated land and takes 10% to 16% of its pesticides. The catch is yield. Organic farms grow less per hectare, so the water behind each kilo of organic fibre can be higher.
Wool brings something the label does not mention. It catches fire at a higher temperature than cotton, spreads flame more slowly, does not melt or drip, and forms a char that puts itself out. That is why it goes into firefighters' clothing and the carpets of trains and aircraft. Sheep, as a rule, do not go up in flames.
What no label tells you is how much the finished mattress gives off in your bedroom at body heat. A mattress of cotton and wool around a core of natural latex has no polyurethane foam to off-gas, and that is the strongest honest case for it. The is built that way: organic latex, medium-firm, in a cover of organic cotton and wool. An organic cotton cover over ordinary foam is mostly a cover. Watch for stain-resistant finishes too. PFAS Forever Chemicals: Where They Hide has the 178 women whose blood carried more of these chemicals when they had stain-resistant carpet or furniture at home.
Allergies
The old version of this article also called organic mattresses hypoallergenic and naturally resistant to dust mites. Dust mites feed on the flakes of skin you shed, and they do not read the label. A female lays 60 to 100 eggs in the last five weeks of her life, and in a ten-week life a mite leaves about 2,000 droppings, plus even more partly digested, enzyme-covered dust particles. Mite allergen turned up in the beds of about 84% of the American homes surveyed.
Sealing the bed against them was put to the test. Unconventional Remedies for Chronic Allergies, linked below, has the two year-long tests: 1,122 adults with asthma, and 279 adults with a mite allergy in the nose, slept with either mite-proof covers or ordinary covers that looked the same. In the first, their lungs did no better after a year. In the second, the covers cut the mite allergen in the mattresses, and the people sleeping on them felt no better. Fewer mites, same sneezes.
Then there is the latex. Natural latex, the core of many organic mattresses, is the milky sap drawn from cuts in the bark of the Pará rubber tree. It is itself an allergen. The proteins in it are what people react to, and about 4.3% of people worldwide are thought to be allergic to it. "Hypoallergenic" is an odd word for a block of it. The rubber that earns the word comes from a shrub called guayule. If rubber gloves or balloons make your skin react, find out what is inside the mattress before you buy it.
Wool, often blamed for itching, comes out better. As far as the evidence goes, the wool fibre itself is not a skin allergen. The itch comes from coarse fibres scratching the skin.
Heat and fabric
If you wake up hot and damp, the fabric may be part of it. Wool can absorb almost a third of its own weight in water, and some fabrics do help sleep. In a test of 17 young adults over nine nights, wool sleepwear got them to sleep faster than cotton in a cool room, at 17 °C. Wool bedding against polyester bedding made no difference.
When nine such tests were reviewed in 2024, wool sleepwear helped adults fall asleep in cool rooms and older adults in warm ones. Linen sheets improved sleep in warm conditions. Goose-down duvets added deep sleep in cool ones.
None of these tests changed the mattress. One that did is in Why You Haven't Slept Your Best Night Yet, linked below: 15 healthy young men got 16% more deep sleep on a mattress built to draw heat away from the body. What touches you counts too, and the animal fibres, wool on the body and down on top, come out of these tests well.
Firmness and age
A firm mattress was long sold as the cure for a bad back. In Spain, 313 adults with chronic low-back pain were given either a firm mattress or a medium-firm one, without knowing which. After 90 days the medium-firm group had less pain in bed and less disability. Nobody had thought to ask the backs.
Age matters too. Why You Haven't Slept Your Best Night Yet also has the people who swapped beds that averaged 9.5 years old for new medium-firm ones. Their sleep and comfort improved and their back and shoulder pain eased, more so as the weeks went on. A new bed cannot be tested blind, so some of that is novelty, but nine and a half years is a long time to sleep on anything.
What to make of it
The oldest bed on record had a reason for its chemistry, and so does yours. The flame retardants came from a cigarette nobody would fix for decades, and the gases rise with your body heat. So is an organic mattress worth it? If the foam and what was added to it are what worry you, one of cotton, wool and latex is the cleanest way out, because it does away with both. It does not do away with dust mites, it brings latex, and no test has yet shown that sleeping on one makes you healthier. A mattress that is medium-firm, reasonably new, aired before use and dressed in the right fabric does most of the work.
Your bedroom should be the safest room in the house. Tonight, find out how old your mattress is.
Sneezing every morning? Unconventional Remedies for Chronic Allergies — why the farm protects, the bedroom covers that failed their test, and the remedies the evidence does not support.
Shopping for better sleep? Why You Haven't Slept Your Best Night Yet (And How to Change That Tonight) — the sleep shop tested, from the pill that buys 22 minutes to the mattress, the blanket and the mask.
Know someone shopping for a new mattress? Send them this, and the cigarette behind the foam.
Disclaimer: This article is general information. For advice about your own health, allergies or back pain, talk to a qualified health professional.
Affiliate Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, All For Life earns from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you. We only link to products we would recommend without the commission.
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