Panda London hybrid bamboo pillow
- Firmness: Medium firm
- Dimensions: 70cm x 40cm x 13cm
- Filling: CharcoCell Foam
- Cover: 100% bamboo
- Guarantee: 10 years
- Trial offer: No
Design
The pillow is a real tech step up from your average feather or microfibre offering. Instead, this has five layers to it, and follows in the footsteps of the bed-in-a-box pillow brand that is bringing innovation to the forefront of our most basic everyday products. This means the pillow is certainly not small and not particularly light. It’s pretty hefty, making travelling with it a bit of a pain.
Panda’s USP is using bamboo, so, naturally, the external cover is made from it. Bamboo is one of the fastest growing plants in the world, making it a viable material to use en mass, and Panda only uses organically grown bamboo from managed forests.
The pillow’s cover is very soft to the touch and, perhaps more importantly, it’s hypoallergenic, making it friendly to those prone to allergies or with sensitive skin. The exterior is 100 per cent bamboo, while the combination filing is 80 per cent bamboo, and 20 per cent recycled polyester. It’s machine washable and has a little concealed zip, so it can be easily removed and put in the washing machine.
Read more: The Panda memory foam bamboo pillow is a cool and comfy remedy for neck pain
There is foam inside the pillow, but put to bed any preconceived misconceptions you might have about this material. It’s no longer extremely dense and more akin to something you’d expect a child’s booster seat to be made out of. Insead, this core is made from charcoal-infused memory foam that has ‘give’ in it, and is still quite soft when squeezed. It’s designed to mould to your sleeping style, and Panda says the charcoal promotes airflow and spreads heat around, which we found mostly to work.
Lastly, the pillow comes with an impressive 10-year guarantee. There’s a QR code on the box, so you can register the pillow to be covered.
Performance
I’m going to get a little bit Goldilocks and the Three Bears here – not too hot, not too cold, just right! But the pillow, being hybrid, is designed to be a middle-of-the-road product. Not in quality, of course, but in design and performance, so it appeals to a wider audience. As, in reality, no one is really just one type of sleeper, as we all move about during the night. You might fall asleep in one position, but then wake in another – or at least I do. And it’s not like I’m going to reach for different pillows during the night. I need an all-rounder.
The pillow is super soft on the exterior, which is the thinner jacket layer (mentioned above) made from very soft bamboo. In its entirety, the pillow has a slightly fluffy feeling about it while still having a proper stable structure to it.
Read more: Soak&Sleep’s Hungarian goose down pillow gave us that five-star feel
Instead, it has body, where the core is firm, but not solid, meaning it’s still able to properly support my neck and spine. The pillow doesn’t compact down to be completely substanceless either – i.e., my head doesn’t end up essentially lying flat on the bed and giving me neck ache.
I’m a front or side sleeper, and, using this pillow, I feel like my head is no longer practically on the bed, as it was with much softer pillows. Instead, it’s slightly raised, but it doesn’t feel like I’ve got two chunky pillows, nor is my neck forced to be at a very awkward or uncomfortable angle.
Read more: This pillow from The White Company is filled with shredded memory foam, so we just had to try it
What I like most about it, is that there’s a little ‘give’. So it feels like you’re resting on a cloud once you lie down on it, with a little sinkage that’s still supportive. The core middle provides sturdy support that most feather or microfibre only pillows just cannot offer – or if they do, it soon dissipates as time goes on and it loses structure.
When it comes to breathability, about which Panda has quite big claims, I did wake up one morning quite hot and had to do the classic pillow flip to get the cooler side. But that’s only been one night out of the entire time I’ve been testing it, so I don’t think it’s a long-term problem.