The Sleep Guy’s Waffle Free Summary
Heavier people who sleep on their front or back should try the Emma Luxe Cooling Mattress (££) as it is firmer than the others. (The £ sign indicates how they compare to other mattresses in the Emma range). Lighter people people who sleep on their side should try the Emma Elite Mattress (£££), as it is softer than the rest.
People who are average size or weight can take their pick from the three medium firmness Emma mattresses. If you tend to get hot in bed and are feeling flushed, go for the Emma NextGen Cooling Mattress (££). If you get hot in bed and are working to a tighter budget then try the Emma NextGen Premium Plus Mattress (£). The other factor is that mattresses are often reduced, so you could pick based on whichever is on offer (see the latest Emma reductions here).
Average size or weight people who like to be cosy in bed and rarely overheat should start with the Emma NextGen Premium Mattress (£)
A more detailed look at the Emma range of mattresses
Emma is one of the trendy new mattress brands which has appeared on the market in the last few years. It’s won more awards than I’ve had hot dinners (well, nearly) and has thousands of reviews.
There are five mattresses sold direct by Emma, at the time of writing (we will discuss later the other mattresses they sell via John Lewis). The Emma range has a subtle evolution in its designs, rather than each one being radically different. None of them are bad choices.
Whichever Emma mattress you buy, you get the same trial period and warranty. The difference is in how they are designed.
In this guide, we will give a run down of the different Emma mattresses. We will also explain how the new mattresses compare to the original Emma mattress and compare it to rivals on price, specification and other flourishes (Ed: does a mattress need flourishes?)
1. Emma NextGen Premium Mattress (£) (medium firmness)
The cheapest Emma mattress is the Emma NextGen Premium Mattress. On occasion, you’ll find other models are cheaper but it’s generally the one with the lowest price.
You get a layer of pocket springs, with three layers of foam on top.
The spring layer on the Emma NextGen Premium Mattress
The idea of the pocket springs is that they give you support that doesn’t wobble around like jelly. Back in the day, your grandma probably had an open coil mattress in her spare bedroom. Pocket springs give a much more pleasant experience, with the only notable downside being that they are a bit of an effort to recycle as each bit of metal is encased in fabric.
There’s a clever thing you can do with pocket springs, which is called zoning. This basically means that some springs are firmer than others so that they compress to work around your beautifully curved body (Ed: not sure my body is beautifully curved). The support you get on your head is different to that which you get on your thighs, lower back etc.
The foam layers on the Emma Next Gen Premium Mattress
The layers of foam then work together to try and keep you comfy and a decent temperature throughout the night and throughout the seasons. Manufacturers who use foam face a perpetual challenge to make sure that you don’t get too hot or cold in bed.
The top layer of foam is memory foam, which first came about as a means of keeping astronauts comfortable. As you’ll be aware, it bounces back slowly so you get a bit of a hugging feeling. The other two layers are different types of foam – one softer, one firmer. It’s worth mentioning that the original Emma mattress buried the memory foam in a sandwich of other foams. This means that the Emma NextGen Premium Mattress has a slight different feel to the Emma Mattress (also known as the Emma Original).
Before we move on…a few words on memory foam
Memory foam has a lot going for it and it’s performed well in a number of studies under laboratory conditions and in real world tests. For example, Gunningberg, Lindholm et al compared visco-elastic foam (another name for memory foam) with ‘standard hospital mattresses’ to see if they would help with pressure sores for patients recovering from hip operations. The result was that ‘patients on standard mattresses tended to develop more severe pressure ulcers’ suggesting that the memory foam did a better job of spreading out pressure across the body (see more details of the study from 2013).
The downsides of a memory foam mattress
Of course, there are negatives attached to memory foam mattresses as well. For example, some academics have studied the environmental impact of incinerating memory foam mattresses once they are finished with. Garrido, Font and Conesa studied this in 2017 and recorded ‘relatively high emissions’ of Nitric Oxide, Ammonia and Hydrogen Cyanide. They concluded that ‘their reduction must be considered’.
2. Emma NextGen Premium Plus Mattress (£) (medium firmness)
To show off the first upgrade option, Emma added in the word ‘Plus’ to make it the Emma NextGen Premium Plus.
This is basically the same mattress as the Emma NextGen Premium but the outer cover is swapped for a ‘cooler cover’ with a ‘unique cooling treatment’. It’s a little tricky to figure out exactly what this treatment is, but from what I can tell they are both polyester (i.e. a manmade material) with a little bit of elastane, which is also known as Spandex or Lycra.
If you find that you are often too hot in bed (ohhhh matron etc.) then I would go for this modestly priced upgrade.
3. Emma Luxe Cooling Mattress (££) (firm)
The next jump up in the Emma range is the Emma Luxe Cooling mattress.
The most notable redesign is the order of the foam layers. We are at serious risk here of veering into a mind-numbingly tedious area of discussion. Take my hand, Thelma, and we’ll get through it together.
On the picture below, the memory foam layer is the white bit between the pink and grey layers. Some people find memory foam makes them too warm, so Emma has buried it under a foam containing graphite (the grey bit).
In the picture of the Emma NextGen Premium Mattress that we used earlier, the memory foam is the yellow layer and it sits at the top of the stack of foam layers. So, with the Emma Luxe Cooling you get less of a memory foam sinking sensation, and you get a cooler mattress. That’s the (dull) theory anyway!
This design has more in common with the Emma Mattress/Emma Original, which was their first mattress. That one similarly had a layer of memory foam sandwiched between other layers of cooler and more breathable foam.
What are the other differences between the Emma Next Gen Premium and the Emma Luxe Cooling mattresses?
You’ll also have noticed the bright blue section at the bottom of the mattress. Or perhaps you didn’t notice it, I’m not judging.
This is a base layer of foam that Emma call HRX. This might sound like something they use in a cinema, but in this case it is High Resiliency Extra. Don’t get too worn out with understanding all the jargon – it is just something you find on an Emma mattress and isn’t a commonly used name.
Mattress companies like to give their layers different names to help them stand out in a competitive market. One days I’ll compile a fascinating dictionary of mattress terminology (Ed: please don’t).
This layer means that the springs are in a sandwich rather than being at the bottom of the mattress. It doesn’t make the mattress any deeper than the Emma NextGen Premium Mattress, so my assumption is that they’ve made the springs smaller to fit it in.
Does that make the mattress better? Honestly, the best advice I can give you is that it makes the mattress more of a foam mattress and less of a sprung mattress. This mattress is closer to being a foam mattress than a sprung mattress than the Emma Next Gen Premium. You can either stick with what you are more familiar with, or be one of life’s risk takers and try something different.
A few firm words before we move on
The Emma Luxe Cooling Mattress is certainly the one to go for if you want a firmer mattress.
Firmness is a funny thing in the mattress market because there isn’t a consistent way of measuring it that every manufacturer uses. I’ve seen some clever technical ratings, but unless everyone uses the same scale, it isn’t much use because one company’s idea of a ‘firm’ mattress will be different to another’s.
It’s a bit like M&S and Next both selling ‘medium’ t-shirts. They’ll probably be about the same size, but there’s no guarantee.
You will also find differing opinions from reviewers on how firm a mattress is. The best you can do is look at lots of different opinions and then try out the mattress.
The importance of getting the right mattress firmness level
In case you aren’t yet bored of my waffle, I’ll explain a little bit about the importance of choosing a mattress with the right firmness for you.
The general idea is that a mattress should give you the right level of support based on your weight and build so that your spine is correctly aligned whilst you sleep. A very heavy person will sink into a very soft mattress too much and end up with a wonky spine. Equally, a four foot tall jockey won’t sink into a very firm mattress enough.
What position do you sleep in?
Another spanner to throw into the works is that the way you sleep also affects the firmness of the mattress that you need. Side sleepers put a bit more pressure on their shoulders and hips, so they usually lean towards a softer mattress than someone who sleeps on their back or front.
So, you need to find a mattress which gives you the right level of support. If you’ve heard people say things like “a firm mattress is good for your back” then you are best to ignore it. Proper experts like the Sleep Council say that you need to find a mattress which is supportive for you (‘Your mattress should be firm enough to support your spine in the correct alignment while conforming to your body’s contours’).
Incidentally, if you are dealing with a bad back then I feel obliged to suggest that you seek out personal and professional advice – I’m just sharing the gist of general advice from experts online.
A few manufacturers give suggestions of what weight their mattresses are ideal for, but not many. For what it’s worth, John Lewis & Partners say that you need a soft mattress if you weigh up to 8 stone, medium for 8 to 16 stone or firm for 16 stone+. However, we can’t apply this rigidly to every mattress company so you are best to either try out a few mattresses in a store, or buy one online which comes with a free trial (more on that later…)
4. Emma NextGen Cooling Mattress (££) (medium firmness)
Hopefully you are still with me as move onto part four of the Emma range. This is a five part series, much like the Rocky films but without as much fighting. Yes, I know there are more than five Rocky films, I’m just referencing the originals. Stop wasting time.
The Emma NextGen Cooling Mattress is our next upgrade.
This one has more in common with the design of the Emma NextGen Premium Mattress. The main difference is that they’ve jiggled around the order of the layers and added in a ‘temperature regulating’ layer, which contains graphite (the grey layer on the picture below). The white layer of memory foam has been relegated to third place. If it were in the Championship then it would be in the play-off places now rather than achieving automatic promotion (Ed: I think the football analogies might just cause more confusion…)
As mentioned earlier, this is a worthwhile upgrade if you tend to get too hot in bed. However, I wouldn’t see it as an upgrade if you like a cosy bed and enjoy the hugging sensation of memory foam.
What about the springs?
The ‘zoning’ on the springs on the Emma Next Gen Cooling Mattress is described as being ‘upgraded’. As a reminder, ‘zones’ on a mattress are where you have different amounts of pressure for different parts of your body. It has the same number of ‘zones’ as the cheaper models, so I’m not entirely clear what the upgrade is but will update if I figure that out.
5. Emma Elite Mattress (£££) (medium-soft firmness)
And so, we arrive at the Rolls Royce of the Emma range – the Emma Elite Mattress. Or perhaps I should update the reference a little and call it the Tesla of the range, as its description has a generous smattering of terms like ‘innovative’ and ‘technology’.
It shares a lot in common with the Emma NextGen Cooling Mattress (££) but there are two notable changes.
The first is the addition of a layer called the ‘AirGrid’. This sits on top of memory foam and two other foam layers. AirGrid is essentially another foam layer, but it has lots of gaps in it to help air circulate better.
The second change is that this is the softest Emma mattress. We waffled on at great length about firmness earlier in the guide, but the gist of it is that softer mattresses are more suited to side sleepers and slighter people. I would avoid the Emma Elite Mattress if you are a sumo wrestler who sleeps on their back.
What about the Emma mattresses sold at John Lewis?
Just when you thought you understood the Emma range of mattresses…you discover that they sell completely different mattresses at John Lewis.
All of the Emma mattresses sold at John Lewis are medium firmness.
Here’s my brief summary, from cheapest to most expensive:
- The Emma Original Memory Foam Mattress (£) is the mattress that Emma began with. They sold a huge number of these and you can still buy it from John Lewis. It’s 100% foam and buries the memory foam a little to help keep you cool. It is medium firmness. You get a 10 year warranty, but you don’t get the risk free trial period, so I would only go for this one if you already have an Emma Original mattress and know that you’ll be happy with it.
- Emma Select Smart Hybrid Mattress (££) uses a mix of springs and foam (which is why it’s called a hybrid). The design is simpler than the mattresses you buy direct from Emma. It doesn’t use any memory foam but it’s got a layer of foam mixed with gel, which is another strategy to keep you cool. There is then another layer of ‘comfort foam’ which sits on top of a layer of springs. You get a trial period and a 10 year warranty with this one.
- Emma Helix Hybrid Mattress (£££) is similar to the Emma Select Smart Hybrid Mattress (££). They have basically added a couple of centimetres to the depth to make the foam layers deeper. They’ve also changed the type of foam under the springs.
- The Emma Diamond Spring Free Mattress (££££) is radically different in design. My jaw hit the floor when I saw this one (Ed: really?). With this model, Emma has returned to its foamy roots and scrapped the springs altogether. This appears to be the more modern version of the Emma Original.
- Finally, we have the Emma Diamond Hybrid Mattress (££££), which is quite similar in design to the Emma Luxe Cooling Mattress (sold direct by Emma). You get springs but you also get a layer of foam with graphite to help keep you cool. There’s also a base layer of foam to put the springs into a lovely comfy sandwich.
So, which Emma mattress sold at John Lewis should I buy?
This is a little trickier, as all the Emma mattresses sold at John Lewis are the same firmness level so we can’t use that as a means of narrowing down the options.
If you already own an Emma Original mattress and love it, then I would stick with what you know and get the Emma Original Memory Foam Mattress (£). The 200 night trial is missing from this one, but you shouldn’t need it if you already know you like it.
If you find yourself getting warm in bed then the four other mattresses are all good contenders. They all make some attempt at keeping you cool and none of them use memory foam as the top layer of foam.
The Emma Diamond Spring Free Mattress (££££) and the Emma Diamond Hybrid Mattress (££££) are obviously the premium models. The hybrid version will give you a more familiar bouncy feel that you will be used to if you have previously owned pocket sprung mattresses. The 100% foam ‘Spring Free’ version will feel more like the Emma Original.
Pros and cons of buying an Emma mattress
Pros:
- Huge number of reviews and very big seller
- Longer and more flexible trial period than most rivals (200 nights) – option to send it back for a refund if you don’t find it comfortable
- Generous 10 year warranty
- Lots of awards including prizes from Good Housekeeping and Ideal Homes
- Handles included to make moving it easier (that isn’t the case with all mattresses)
- Choice of firmness levels depending on which model you choose
Cons:
- Some customers comment on an initial chemical smell, although that fades
- A couple of brands offer longer trial periods and warranties (e.g. Nectar Sleep)
- Single sided, like most foam mattresses
What reviews do customers give The Emma Mattress?
The Emma brand scores 3.1/5 on TrustPilot, as of 2024.
- Panda London – 4.8/5 (bamboo mattresses)
- Ergoflex – 4.7/5 (memory foam mattress)
- Sealy – 4.5/5 (famous name with mostly sprung mattresses)
- Simba Sleep – 4.5/5 (range of memory foam and hybrid mattresses)
- Happy Beds – 4.4/5 (cheap sprung mattresses)
- OTTY – 4.3/5 (memory foam and hybrid mattresses)
- Sleepeezee – 4.3/5 (sprung mattresses, long established)
- REM Fit – 4.2/5 (memory foam and hybrid mattresses)
- Nectar Sleep – 4.1/5 (memory foam and hybrid mattresses)
- DreamCloud – 4.1/5 (hybrid mattress)
- Dormeo – 4.1/5 (memory foam mattresses)
- Hypnos Beds – 4.1/5 (luxury pocket sprung mattresses)
- Silentnight 4.1/5 (huge brand with big range)
- Vispring – 4.1/5 (luxury pocket sprung mattresses)
- Eve Sleep – 4/5 (memory foam and hybrid mattresses)
- Harrison Spinks (makers of John Lewis & Partners Natural Collection) – 3.9/5
- Tempur – 3.9/5 (luxury memory foam)
- Emma Mattress – 3.1/5 (hybrid mattresses)
- Brook + Wilde Sleep – 3/5 (hybrid mattresses)
- Mammoth – 2.9/5 (foam mattresses)
- Dunlopillo – 2.6/5 (latex mattresses) – although the Danish version has more reviews and scores 4.6/5
In case you are curious, we looked at the TrustPilot ‘TrustScore’ for every major mattress brand we could find which sells in the UK. These are brand scores. A company like Emma has dozens of products, including bedding, mattresses and pillow. It also isn’t an exhaustive list.
To give you a flavour of the reviews on TrustPilot, we’ve picked out one positive review and one negative reviews. We like to focus on reviews which are about the mattress rather than the buying process or whether the delivery driver had a nice smile. We also look for reviews from people who have had several months to try it out rather than a couple of nights.
Image from TrustPilot of one of many positive reviews of the Emma Mattress
The remarkable rise of the Emma Mattress brand
This is a good moment to mention the way in which the Emma Mattress and some of its rivals have offered a ‘disruptive’ alternative to the traditional way of buying a mattress in the last decade.
The graph below is remarkable and will hopefully be of interest, even if you don’t love graphs as much as me.
The blue line shows us how many people have searched for the term ‘silentnight mattress’ between 2004 and today. I’ve picked out Silentnight as it is considered the UK’s biggest mattress brand. The red line shows relative interest in the search term ’emma mattress’. As you’ll see, people started searching for the ’emma mattress’ in 2017 and the numbers have kept rising since. Silentnight has stayed relatively steady.
Emma isn’t alone in this – it is a similar story for Simba Sleep and some other ‘bed in a box’ brands. Several arrived around the same time, offering an alternative to the familiar mid-priced pocket spring brands. These new brands offered longer warranties, home trial periods, big marketing campaigns, less choice and more foam than traditional mattresses.
What guarantee and home trial period do Emma Mattresses offer?
The Emma Mattress is one of several ‘bed in a box’ mattresses which comes with a trial period, although Emma’s is better than most as it now has a 200 night ‘risk free trial’. There’s some variation in the way these things work, but the Emma Mattress one is a simple one.
You pay upfront for the mattress and then can contact them to get your money back if you don’t like it. They pay the returns postage cost. Some other similar mattresses will only swap your mattress for another one they sell, which does limit you a bit.
As well as the 200 night trial, Emma also say that ‘you can try the Emma Mattress for a couple of days and if you feel like it is too soft or too hard, we can send you a free of charge comfort layer, either soft or firm, to adjust the mattress to your preferences’.
The Emma Mattress warranty
Meanwhile, the Emma Mattress comes with a 10 year guarantee. At the time of writing, the warranty covers ‘cracks, dents or other damages to the foam that have occurred despite proper use and handling of the mattress.’
Please do take a few minutes to check over the terms of the guarantee and the risk free trial. To be fair, there isn’t a lot of smallprint with the Emma Mattress, but these things do get updated occasionally.
For the purposes of comparison, we looked at the warranty length of every double size pocket spring mattress for sale at Mattress Online which cost between £600 and £700 (roughly the price of The Emma Mattress). As the chart below shows, of the 21 mattresses only three offered a 10 warranty which matches the length of the Emma Mattress. The majority offered a warranty which is half the length. This should be seen as a positive endorsement for the Emma Mattress – although as we’ll explore later in this guide, it is less outstanding when we compare The Emma Mattress to rival foam mattresses. Our data is from 2024.
Where can I buy The Emma Mattress?
Like most ‘bed in a box’ mattresses, the Emma Mattress is mostly sold direct from the manufacturer but you can also get the Emma Mattress from a couple of other big outlets. Prices do vary a bit, so I would check them all to see which is the best deal.
John Lewis & Partners also sells The Emma Mattress. As mentioned earlier, most models come the 200 night trial period (but not all of them).
Where can I get a discount code for The Emma Mattress?
The first place to look for discount codes on The Emma Mattress is on the Emma website itself.
Any others we get hold will appear at the top of this page.
Honestly, you’ll be first to know.
Will they take away my old mattress if I buy The Emma Mattress?
Yes, they will take away your old mattress if you buy an Emma Mattress. Curiously, not every mattress company offers this so you are sometimes left to fend for yourself.
There are a couple of things you need to be aware of though. Firstly, you pay extra for a mattress collection (£35 at the time of writing). Secondly, you might want to bear in mind that if you send back The Emma Mattress under the 200 night trial offer then you’ll be left without a mattress. I’m sure you’d thought of that already, but I just didn’t want you to end up sleeping on the floor. You’re welcome.
What are the alternatives to The Emma Mattress?
Some other award-winning foam mattresses which are alternatives to The Emma Mattress include:
The Nectar Sleep Mattress
- The Nectar Sleep (£600) beats the range of Emma mattresses on a couple of key features. Firstly, the trial period lasts for a whole year meaning that you can it out in all weathers – although Emma’s 200 night trial is not exactly small. Secondly, the Nectar Sleep shines through with its ‘forever’ warranty. You may feel that the 10 years offered by Emma is adequate and it’s certainly better than you get with many similarly priced pocket sprung mattresses. It’s classed as a medium/firm mattress. In our side by side comparison, the Nectar Sleep brand scores higher on TrustPilot than Emma with a score of 4.1/5.
Eve Sleep Original
Eve Sleep Original (£499) – the Eve Sleep Original comes with a 200 night trial, which matches Emma’s 200 night trial period. They have the same warranty length and Eve Sleep is similar to Emma in that it has expanded from mattress to a wider choice (read our guide to Eve Sleep’s range).
Facts and figures – how does the Emma Mattress compare to its rivals?
There are thousands of mattresses on the UK market but it’s relatively easy to pick out the rivals to the Emma Mattress. These mattresses all have some key attributes in common – they arrive compacted in a box, they offer a home trial period and a long warranty and they are somewhere around £500 – £1000. Most of them also offer decent discounts from time to time, so you may be able to save yourself a considerable amount off the price listed below.
A limited range of mattress sizes
The choice of sizes with the Emma NextGen Premium Mattress doesn’t match up to The Simba Hybrid, the REM-Fit 400 or the OTTY Hybrid Mattress but the vast majority of British mattress shoppers are looking for one of the standard sizes.
The Emma Mattress also outperforms several of its rivals with its 200 night trial period. Only Nectar Sleep and The Simba Hybrid Original come with equal or better. However, the warranty length is comfortably beaten by Nectar Sleep and REM-Fit 400.
The Emma Mattress comes in a firmness level which will suit many people, but it won’t be right for everyone
Our mattress comparison chart
| What’s it called? | How much is it? (Double) | Warranty and trial | How firm is it? | Brand score (TrustPilot) | Sizes available |
| Emma NextGen Premium Mattress | £659 | 10 years, 200 night trial | Medium | 3/5 | Single, Small Double, Double, King, Super King |
| Simba Hybrid Original Mattress | £869 | 10 years, 200 night trial | Medium/firm | 4.5/5 | EU Single, Single, Small Double, EU Double, Double, EU Queen, King, Super King |
| Nectar Sleep Memory Foam Mattress | £600 | ‘Forever’, 365 night trial | Medium/firm | 4.1/5 | Single, Double, King, Super King |
| Just Snug by Silentnight | £500 | 10 years, 365 night comfort trial | Medium | 4.1/5 | Single, Double, King Size |
| Ergoflex 5G | £966 | 10 years, 30 night trial | Medium/firm | 4.7/5 | Single, Double, Euro Double, King, Euro King, Super King |
| Eve Original | £499 | 10 years, 200 night trial | Medium/firm | 3.9/5 | Single, Small Double, Double, King, Super King |
| OTTY Hybrid Mattress | £699 | 10 years, 100 night trial | Medium/firm | 4.5/5 | Single, EU Single, Small Double, EU Double, Double, EU King, King, Super King, Emperor |
| REM-Fit 400 | £999 | 15 years, 100 night trial | Medium/firm | 4.1/5 | Small Single, Long Single, Single, EU Single, Small Double, Double, EU Double, King, EU King, Super King |
Review scores and prices are correct at the time of writing (2024).
Warranty length – how does Emma compare to Simba, Eve, Nectar and others?
It’s a solid mid-table position for Emma in our chart showing the comparative warranty lengths of popular bed in a box mattress brands.
There are some caveats to this. Nectar Sleep’s ‘forever’ warranty wouldn’t fit on our graph, so we recorded it at 25 years.
Several mattress brands have released budget versions of their ‘original’ or ‘standard’ mattresses in recent years. These are usually thinner and have a less generous warranty period, but we’ve rated them based on their standard models.
Also, make sure you read the smallprint as some warranties have multiple clauses whilst others are relatively straightforward. Figures are correct at the time of writing.
