Hi,
My favorite mattress was a flippable mattress with pillowtop on both sides. That was 15 years ago. The pillowtop was fairly thin and quite comfortable. Does anyone know what the pillowtop portion was made from? Were they cotton? polyurethane? Polyester fiber?
The new pillowtops are just too thick and mushy. I’ve tried making my own by adding a topper to tight top, but don’t care for the talalay latex, or memory foams.
Does anyone still have one of those beds and can check a tag for materials?
Asking someone what is inside of their own 15-year old mattress (if they had one in the house) wouldn’t be much a predictor as to what would be inside yours. There are tens of thousands of different combinations of mattresses and their interior componentry, and what was used inside of mattresses 15 years ago is about the same as what is used now – it’s just that the quality tends to be poorer.
Generally speaking, a common mattress 15years ago would have been two-sided. There was normally an innerspring unit in the center of the mattress, with foam layers on the top and bottom of that unit. A common build-up would have been some sort of pre-compressed pad (cotton or polyester fibers), then various layers of polyfoam in the upholstery layer. In a pillowtop panel, there usually would have been a layer or two of polyfoam, then the quilt panel that would have had poly foam and some sort of Dacron-style fiber quilted to the covering. That was quite common. Of course, there were large variations in the densities and IFD/ILD of those foams.
If you still had the law tag on your old mattress, if would only list the general contents, such as steel innerspring unit, polyurethane foams and polyester fiber, and perhaps their percentages. It wouldn’t provide any meaningful information.
Here’s a video of an old mattress being cut open as an example.