Before you go out and obtain memory foam toppers for your bed, you may wish to consider a couple of things. Almost everyone with a mattress of visco memory foam seems to love it, raving about how they get such good nights of sleep with such good support. And who can forget the fact that this foam’remembers’ its original shape in the morning, and returns to it after you get up? All of this is great, but a topper simply might not give you the same benefits as a complete foam bed.
What makes a memory foam bed work so well is a mixture of things. The top layer of foam is what softens when exposed to body heat, changing to adjust itself to your contours. But the memory foam in lower levels of the mattress retains its shape and firmness, since the heat doesn’t reach down that far. That quality of support provided by the lower level of the foam stems from its high density ; in a few cases as much as 8 pounds per cubic foot. This very firm support is just as important to the function of the memory mattress as the softening and changing of the upper level.
And that is where the problem comes in with a memory foam bed topper. If it is’s not sitting on something almost as firm as the lower levels of foam in a regular visco memory foam mattress, then the topper doesn’t have the support it wishes. Mix this with the indisputable fact that many regular mattresses have places where they sag to some degree, and a layer of memory foam on top will sag right together with them. This will just about annul any benefits that could have been derived from the memory foam topper.
All of this means that you might want to think carefully about simply buying a memory foam topper and sticking it on top of your ordinary bed. Unless you’ve already got a particularly firm mattress, completely flat with no flagging anywhere, then the foam in the topper won’t have enough underlying support to give you with the advantages of the best memory foam mattress. If you are going to spend the money anyhow, you may as well go for the entire bed. That might be preferable to never getting all of the benefits you were expecting to gain.
