Do Allswell Mattresses Have Fiberglass?

If you’ve been shopping for a mattress for a while, you probably have learned that it’s best to avoid mattresses with fiberglass inside them. You may have also run across the Allswell brand and wondered if it is one of the affordable mattress brands without fiberglass. Unfortunately, the answer is no.

The Allswell Mattress Brand

The Allswell mattress brand is marketed as an affordable luxury mattress. They offer hybrid mattresses at rock-bottom prices. The bad news is that they are able to create this affordability by cutting corners on quality and safety.

One of those corners is the use of fiberglass. Allswell mattresses use this cheap and unsafe material in their mattresses to meet fire safety standards.

What is Fiberglass?

Fiberglass is a type of plastic that is reinforced with microscopic glass fibers to give it strength. The glass fibers make the plastic tougher without compromising its flexibility. This creates a material that can be used for just about any purpose you can imagine.

There’s fiberglass inside your home’s walls in the form of insulation. There’s fiberglass in your car. There’s even fiberglass in many items around your house, such as sporting equipment and bathtubs.

However, only a single type of fiberglass goes into most mattresses. This is called glass cloth. Glass cloth is made by weaving threads made of fiberglass into a sheet of fabric. The glass cloth in mattresses comes in the form of a sock that goes around the inner components of the mattress.

SEE ALSO: Softest Mattress in a Box

Why Would a Mattress Have Fiberglass?

Mattresses have fiberglass for one reason and one reason only: fire protection. Not a lot of people know this, but mattresses are actually highly flammable. A lot of components inside mattresses can easily ignite, and this is especially true of foam mattresses.

For this reason, mattresses are legally required to meet certain fire safety standards. Fiberglass helps manufacturers make their mattresses sufficiently fire retardant. In the event it is exposed to high heat, glass cloth does not burst into flame. Rather, it melts. This creates a fire barrier over the foam inside the mattress so that it cannot ignite.

Fiberglass is the cheapest way to make mattresses less combustible. But it is not the only way, nor is it the safest way. This is why it’s better to go for types of mattresses that offer alternative flame retardants.

Drawbacks of Fiberglass

There are several significant drawbacks to having fiberglass inside your mattress, and they all have to do with how it affects your health. Fiberglass exposure can actually be quite dangerous. When tiny glass particles escape the fiberglass and come into contact with your body, they can cause irritation in everything they touch. And it can be difficult to clean up fiberglass that’s escaped.

If fiberglass comes into contact with your skin, it leaves thousands of tiny microscopic cuts all over it. This can result in rashes and even severe dermatitis. Breathing in fiberglass particles can cause lung and airway irritation and infection. And getting the particles into your eyes can lead to irritated eyes and even eye damage.

For all these reasons, it is just not worth having fiberglass in your mattress. You may think that the cover prevents you from being exposed to fiberglass. But the glass particles can actually make their way between the threads of the cover and up to your body.

Benefits of Fiberglass

There really is no benefit to having fiberglass inside your mattress. It is, after all, the cheapest fire barrier on the market. This can translate into savings for the end consumer. But when you consider the risks of fiberglass exposure, saving a few bucks is hardly worth it.

Fiberglass Alternatives for Mattresses

The good news is there are several fiberglass alternatives inside some of the best mattresses that offer the same fire protection without the health risks. Some of these alternatives don’t even cost that much more than fiberglass. Many manufacturers use silica fiber as a fiberglass alternative. Some use thistle or viscose rayon, and these materials are commonly seen in vegan mattresses.

One of the most popular and best fiberglass alternatives is wool. Wool is very good at preventing flames from spreading in a mattress without fiberglass, and it’s also quite difficult to ignite. Furthermore, wool also adds an extra layer of pressure relief and breathability to the mattresses that contain it. This is one of the reasons it is so popular, even in mattresses not marketed as natural.

A few mattress brands that rely on fiberglass alternatives include:

• Amerisleep mattresses
• Saatva mattresses
• Puffy mattresses
• Novilla mattresses
• Purple mattresses
• Sweetnight mattresses
• Tuft and Needle mattresses
• Most IKEA mattresses

How to Tell if a Mattress Has Fiberglass

If you want to know whether a new mattress you are considering has fiberglass, this should be easy. All mattresses are legally required to come with a sheet or leaflet listing their ingredients for the consumer.

These ingredients may also be listed on the manufacturer’s website, and they should tell you whether the mattress has fiberglass and what percentage of the mattress is made of fiberglass if it contains it.

If you’re wondering whether your existing mattress has fiberglass, it may be a little harder to tell. If you’ve lost the ingredient list and cannot find the mattress brand and model online, look at the care tag.

Most mattresses have tags attached to the cover that give care instructions for the mattress. If the tag prohibits removing the mattress cover, it’s quite possible this is because there’s fiberglass underneath it.

You can also research which mattress brands and retailers have been questioned on their potential use of fiberglass:

• Lucid mattresses
• Zinus mattresses
• LinenSpa mattresses
• Nectar mattresses
• Vibe mattresses
• Ashley Furniture mattresses
• Casper mattresses
• Leesa mattresses
• Olee mattresses
• Some Helix mattresses
• Big Lots mattresses
• Amazon mattresses
• Wayfair mattresses

Is Allswell a Good Mattress Brand?

Allswell markets itself as a mattress brand that offers luxury at an affordable price. While it’s true that it does offer luxury mattress features like hybrid construction, cooling gel memory foam, and panel quilting, the fact that it contains fiberglass is a problem.

No amount of luxury can make up for the health risks of using this unsafe material to cut costs. Furthermore, if a mattress company is willing to cut costs by using a known hazardous material, it makes one wonder what other corners they may be cutting. The bottom line is it’s best to go with a mattress brand that finds other ways to offer affordability.

FAQs

Should I always avoid buying a mattress with fiberglass?

Yes. The best thing you can do to protect yourself from fiberglass exposure is to avoid buying a mattress that has any fiberglass at all. Some mattresses that contain fiberglass are marketed as safe because the fiberglass inside them comes inside some sort of protective fabric shell.

This does make mattresses containing fiberglass less likely to expose you to this dangerous material. But it does not entirely eliminate the risk of exposure. This means the best thing you can do to avoid exposure is to avoid all mattresses containing any fiberglass.

And considering that many fiberglass alternatives on the market today do not cost all that much more than fiberglass itself, this doesn’t even have to be a pain in the wallet.

What do vegan mattresses use as fire protection?

Vegan mattresses typically use some sort of plant-based viscose as a fire retardant. Viscose rayon is usually made of cellulose fiber. Cellulose is processed into a pulp and then spun into thread that is then used to weave a fabric.

This is how bamboo and Lyocell sheets are made, and it can work to create fire socks too. Often, the wood pulp is bonded to a small amount of polyester or silica to increase its fire resistance. But it typically contains much less of these synthetic materials than it does natural materials.

Why is fiberglass more dangerous inside mattresses?

Since fiberglass is found just about everywhere in our environment without making us sick, you might be wondering why it is so different inside a mattress. This is due to the fact that you spend so much time on a mattress, as well as the fact that the type of fiberglass inside mattresses is different than other forms of fiberglass.

Of course, you spend much more time around your mattress than you do around the fiberglass insulation inside your walls or the fiberglass components under your car’s hood. This means the chances of fiberglass exposure go up for the simple fact that you’re around the fiberglass in your mattress so much more.

Glass cloth is also one of the types of fiberglass that is more likely to release glass particles. The fiberglass inside boats, for example, is rigid and structured. This means it is much less likely to release tiny glass particles than flexible cloth.

What is the best fiberglass alternative for a mattress?

The best fiberglass alternative for mattresses is wool. Not only is wool resistant to combusting, but if it does ignite, it can often extinguish flame internally. This makes it naturally good at keeping flames at bay. This natural material will also not pose any threat to your health.

Furthermore, wool is also a great fiberglass alternative because it increases the comfort of your mattress. Whereas most fire barriers don’t do anything to improve your mattress’s comfort, wool increases both its breathability and its pressure relief.

How much more are mattresses without fiberglass?

There are a number of factors that go into deciding how much a mattress costs, and fiberglass is just one of them. Generally speaking, mattress manufacturers that use fiberglass also cut a number of other corners to keep their products cheap. This may make it appear that fiberglass-free mattresses are much more expensive than mattresses containing fiberglass.

However, this isn’t the case. Dollar for dollar, a mattress that does not contain fiberglass should not cost all that much more than a mattress that does as long as you are comparing it to a mattress of similar quality and construction (i.e. a memory foam mattress to a memory foam mattress). Expect to pay around $50 to $100 more just to avoid fiberglass.

Bottom Line

There are plenty of affordable mattress brands on the current market that do not contain fiberglass. Unfortunately, Allswell is not one of them. This means you should avoid their products if you want a safe and healthy mattress.