What the Surface Won't Hold

A new baby makes a household fluent in materials very quickly. The cot is chosen carefully, the labels on the nursery shelf get read twice, the paint is checked, and the air in that one room starts to matter in a way it never did before. One surface tends to escape all of it, which is the parents' own bed, where the child is carried, fed and settled at every hour of the night.

It is also the surface in the house best suited to holding things.

What a dust mite is asking for

Three things, and they are not exotic. Warmth. Moisture. Something soft and fibrous to settle into and feed in.

Warmth, damp, and something soft to settle into.

A bedroom in this climate supplies the first two without being asked. Mean relative humidity sits near 84 percent, the room is sealed against the outdoors so the aircon can work, and a sleeping body adds warmth and moisture to that for eight hours a night. Those conditions are not adjustable in any practical way. The third one is, because the third one is a material choice.

Most mattresses supply it generously. Synthetic foam and fibrous padding hold the warmth and the moisture the body gives off, and loose fill gives dust, and the mites that live on it, somewhere to gather and stay. The result accumulates quietly over years inside the one object a family spends about a third of its life against.

What latex offers instead

GOLS certified organic latex starts as sap tapped from the rubber tree, and it sets as a dense, continuous material rather than as loose fibre. There is very little in it of the soft airy fill a mite burrows into, which is the structural half of why the latex is naturally hypoallergenic and dust-mite resistant.

Breathability is the other half, and it works on the moisture rather than on the material. The open-cell structure lets heat and damp move up and out through the body of the latex instead of pooling where you have been lying, so the surface does not become the warm reservoir the whole arrangement depends on. Take away the fill and take away the damp, and what is left is a place that offers a mite two of its three requirements and neither of the ones that matter.

That is a property of the material. It needs no spray, no encasement, no treatment to be reapplied, and nothing that wears off.

The casing, and the space between the layers

The taupe casing is bamboo rather than cotton, and that is the same decision made again. Cotton soaks and then holds what it soaked, against the mattress, all night. Bamboo carries it off, so the layer nearest the sleeper stays drier through a humid night.

Underneath it, the three layers of GOLS certified organic latex are held by the fit of the casing and by the weight of the material, with nothing bonded between them. There is no fibrous batting glued in at the interfaces for dust to work into, and no adhesive to break down over the years and shed. It also means the casing lifts off and goes in the washing machine, which is the part that actually gets done rather than the part that gets recommended. The same is true of the other large soft object in the bed.

A surface that holds less

None of this is a health claim and it should not be read as one. It is a description of a material and what that material does not offer. For a household that has recently started reading every label in the house, that is a more useful thing than a badge: not a promise about anybody's sleep, but a bed you can account for, in a room a small child is in at every hour.

Explore The Mattress, or what we will and will not claim.