Red Nomad 10-inch Memory Foam Mattress
Pros
- Medium-soft firmness, most sleepers found it very comfortable
- No smell
- Superior heat regulation, new tech
- Dual-layered
Cons
- Sides of mattress may not support heavier individuals
The wait is over. Red Nomad, one of the top memory foam mattress companies in America today, has released a brand new 10-inch memory foam mattress that may just surpass all expectations. And guess who has first-hand access to one of these bad boys?… the Zen Sleeping review team, of course! Does the Red Nomad 10-inch Memory Foam Mattress lives up to the hype, or does it sink and sag under all our expectations? Read on to find out…
Quick FAQ
The Red Nomad 10-inch Memory Foam Mattress (Queen) is going for less than $375 on Amazon.
For a queen-sized mattress, it will come shipped in Red Nomad’s proprietary shipping box weighing roughly 60 lbs and with dimensions 18” x 18” x 42”.
The Red Nomad 10-inch is dual-layered, so it has 2.
The top layer is 2 inches thick and is made with Cool Cycle Technology.
Comfort is a metric that has many different factors and changes a lot from person to person. Generally speaking though, we believe the Red Nomad 10-inch Queen Memory Foam Mattress is a great candidate for sleepers who are not extremely heavy (weigh less than 250 lbs) and prefer their mattresses to be on the softer side.
Our side sleeper test passed with flying colors, so we believe side sleepers of most sizes (except for very heavy individuals) will have a comfortable sleeping experience. If this is your first memory foam mattress though, it may take some time to get used to the firmness.
Yes, it comes with an amazingly soft jacquard cover.
Both our own testers and responses from questionnaires showed that there was no smell with the Red Nomad 10-inch mattress.
Our professional testers found the mattress’s Cool Cycle Technology to do a great job of regulating the mattress’s heat. No complaints here about getting too hot.
Yes, you can find info about the warranty on the main Amazon product page.
The Red Nomad 10-inch Memory Foam Mattress has been reviewed using the Zen Score System, which gives a score out of 100 based on 6 main factors: Unpacking (20pts), Smell (20 pts), Feel & Firmness (20 pts), Durability (20 pts), and Heat Regulation (20 pts) . We have also conducted interviews with over 50 verified purchasers of the mattress to give you very relevant statistics for all these categories.
Contents
Unpacking the Red Nomad 10-inch Memory Foam Mattress
The Queen-size version of the Red Nomad 10-inch Memory Foam Mattress comes shipped in a proprietary Red Nomad shipping box weighing roughly 60 lbs. Its dimensions are 18” x 18” x 42”, so you may need an extra pair of hands to help you unpack the mattress from the box. The box will typically look like this:
TIP: Generally, it is best to open the mattress in a room that is currently unoccupied, well-ventilated and receives a good amount of sunlight per day. When mattresses are first opened out of their vacuum-sealed bags, they immediately start to expand and typically give off a “new memory foam” smell which can sometimes be quite strong and bothersome. Letting the mattress air out and expand in a ventilated room for a few days is the best way to get rid of the smell. Also, don’t sleep on it during this period of time, or place any sheets or mattress protectors over it.
Once you open the box, you will find the Red Nomad 10-inch to be rolled vertically and wrapped by an airtight plastic material. Remember, once you rip open this material, the mattress will start to expand rapidly!!! Here’s what the mattress looks like inside the box:
The following pictures show you how quickly the mattress will expand once you tear open the plastic airtight material that is covering the mattress. Between the first and last pictures below, it took only 30 minutes for the mattress to expand to 90% of its full width.
Where Was The Red Nomad 10-inch Made?
All Red Nomad mattress products are manufactured and sold in the good ol’ United States. It says a lot for a company to continue sourcing materials and manufacturing quality mattresses in the States without compromising the price, especially when there are lots of American brands selling cheap and sometimes dangerous foam from China. When the product and materials are all sourced from and made in the USA, however, you can usually rest assured that the product is very safe.
Is It Made From Safe Materials?
Red Nomad mattresses are all CertiPUR-US certified, which means their mattresses are :
– Made without ozone depletes
– Made without PBDE flame retardants
– Made without mercury, lead, and other heavy materials
– Made without phthalates regulated by Consumer Product Safety Commission
– Low VOC (Volatile Organic Compound) emissions for indoor air quality
Thickness & Density
The Red Nomad 10-inch Memory Foam Mattress is a 2-layered mattress, and we love to see that. Generally speaking, we at Zen Sleeping like to recommend mattresses that are dual-layered vs. 3-layered. Why, you may ask?
Think about it this way. A memory foam mattress may look like one big piece of memory foam, but it is always actually 2 or more pieces of foam put on top of each other and covered tight by an outer layer. Over time, after many nights of sleeping on the mattress, your body’s natural sleeping movements can affect the way the layers sit on each other. If your mattress has 3 layers and is not the highest-quality product, there is a chance that the different layers may move so much that the comfort and shape of the mattress eventually gets compromised.
Therefore, it is usually advised to choose a 2-layered memory foam mattress over a 3-layered one. We often also recommend 3-layered mattresses to our readers, but those mattresses have been thoroughly vetted and tested by us to ensure that this issue won’t happen.
The top layer of the Red Nomad 10-inch is 2 inches thick and is made from Red Nomad’s proprietary Cool Cycle Technology memory foam. The thickness is pretty standard, although we prefer seeing at least 2.5 inches normally… but no big deal. This “Cool Cycle Technology” is intriguing because it’s a new type of foam developed by Red Nomad, so check out our section on Heat Regulation to see its effectiveness.
The bottom layer of the Red Nomad 10-inch Memory Foam Mattress is 8 inches thick and made from a high density foam base. The bottom layer of memory foam mattresses must be high density in order to prevent your body from sagging and sinking too low. 8 inches of high density foam is a great thickness to give you enough support without compromising comfort. Overall, we are pretty happy with this mattress thus far!
Total points awarded for Unpacking: 19 / 20
Smell
You hear about it all the time: someone buys a memory foam mattress and is all excited to try it out for the first time. They unpack the box, take out the mattress and rip open the plastic to let the mattress start expanding, and… what is that smell?!?!
So, we use our own noses to test for smell… so you, our lovely readers, are spared! Playfulness aside though, the smell of a memory foam mattress can range from non-existent, to “eyes red and watery, can’t properly get a good night’s sleep” strong. And since every unit of a specific mattress can have a different range of smells, the only real way to test for smell is to poll a bunch of people! So, we talked to 50 owners of the Red Nomad 10-inch Memory Foam Mattress and asked them how much their mattress smells.
Here’s what we found out:
- No Smell - 55%
- Light odor, gone in 3 days - 40%
- Mild odor, gone in 5 days - 5%
- Strong odor, gone in 7 days - 0%
You can’t really beat these results. Over 95% of users did not notice any smell or said it had a light odor. 5% said it had a medium odor, and absolutely no one thought it had a strong smell.
Verdict: We at Zen Sleeping can resoundingly say that new purchasers of the Red Nomad 10-inch mattress will NOT notice any smell.
Total points awarded for Smell: 20 / 20
Feel & Firmness
As always, before delving into this topic we like to remind our readers that feel, firmness, and the general comfort level of any mattress differs a lot from person to person. While using weight and gender can provide logical guidelines for us to follow, there will always be 100 lb females who love super-firm mattresses and 300 lb males who can’t get enough of extremely plushy and soft surfaces. To make things as holistic as possible here at Zen Sleeping, we use our own professional opinion as well as curated responses from over 50 verified purchasers who sleep on the Red Nomad 10-inch Memory Foam Mattress every night.
Feel & Firmness Test
After thoroughly testing out the Red Nomad 10-inch Memory Foam Mattress here’s what we found out:
Medium-Soft for Back Sleepers
The mattress should have somewhere between a soft and medium firmness for the majority of back sleepers. The heavier an individual is, the more the mattress will tend to feel softer, but only up to a certain weight. If you weigh over 300 lbs, we do not recommend using this mattress because the 2-inch top layer may not be enough to fully support you. If the top layer can’t support you, then you will feel the 8-inch high-density layer instead, which is super firm and uncomfortable. So as long as you weigh below 300 lbs and sleep on your back, the Red Nomad 10-inch mattress will feel soft to medium.
Medium for Side Sleepers
Side sleepers generally have a tougher time with memory foam mattresses because they sleep with less of their surface area on the bed. Typically, the same mattress will feel “softer” for back sleepers than for side sleepers. Based on our own professional testers, the Red Nomad 10-inch mattress will have a medium firmness for side sleepers.
Our Verified Purchasers Weigh In
To supplement our professional opinions on comfort level, feel and firmness, we have data points on over 100 verified purchasers of the Red Nomad Memory Foam Mattress. Here’s what they had to say:
- Comfortable feel - 93%
- Too firm - 2%
- Too soft - 5%
93% of our verified purchasers found the mattress to be a very comfortable sleeping experience. 5% believe it is too soft, and 2% too firm.
Verdict: for back sleepers, the Red Nomad 10-inch Memory Foam Mattress will feel very comfortable for you if you prefer medium-soft firmness. If you are a heavier set individual (above 300 lbs), you should look for mattresses with 3 layers or 2 layers but with a thicker top layer. For side sleepers, the mattress has a “medium” firmness rating.
Total points awarded for Feel: 18.5 / 20
Durability
How can you tell if a mattress will be durable and last long? Well, there are 4 main things to look for: adequate density, high-quality garment construction, resistance to surface/ edge abrasions, and stain release capabilities. In this section we dive into each of these factors.
Density
The density of a memory foam mattress’s top layer is arguably the most important factor in determining how long it will last. Mattresses with low memory foam density will literally “give out” and start sinking in a few months to a year, so we can’t stress enough the importance of density.
As of the date of the posting of this article, we haven’t been able to gather the exact density of the top layer of this mattress. Based off of our experience with Red Nomad, however, we believe that the density is high enough to provide adequate durability without compromising comfort.
Garment Construction
Garment construction refers to how resistant the mattress cover and actual mattress are to tearing at the sides, seams, and edges. The Red Nomad 10-inch Memory Foam Mattress comes with a super comfortable jacquard cover, and we polled 50 current owners to see their thoughts about garment construction. Here’s what they said:
100% reported no tears of the mattress foam, and 100% reported no tears of the mattress cover.
Surface / Edge Abrasion
A durable mattress will be more resistant to surface and edge abrasions; these basically occur from the repeated rubbing of the mattress/ cover surface to sheets, your body, etc over many nights of use. This is what our 50 polled owners of the Red Nomad had to say about surface edge abrasion:
100% reported no wearing of the mattress cover surface, and 100% reported no surface or edge abrasions of the foam material.
Stain Release
Lastly, a mattress and cover are more durable when they are better able to release stains. Out of the total 50 owners of the Red Nomad 10-inch mattress that were polled, only 10 had had spills or generally made stains on the mattress. Of those stains, 90% of them were treated completely.
Verdict
Even though we could not gather information about density, based on the other durability factors we are confident that the Red Nomad 10-inch Memory Foam Mattress will last at least 5 years without any major issues.
Total points awarded for Durability: 19 / 20
Heat Regulation
Other than the possible “memory foam smell”, there is another infamous stereotype usually associated with memory foam mattresses: they trap heat!! How true or false this is depends a lot on the quality of the materials used to make each mattress, so it’s always super important to know the brand and company you’re purchasing from. As a general rule, American and European-made memory foam products have great heat regulation (i.e. they don’t get hot), while products from China have terrible heat regulation.
So then, we should just assume the Red Nomad 10-inch mattress is great at heat regulation, right? Wrong!!! At Zen Sleeping, we do not take heat regulation lightly… it is one of our hottest topics – pun intended.
The Red Nomad 10-inch Memory Foam Mattress uses what they call “Cool Cycle Technology” in their top layer to regulate heat and let air flow throughout the mattress, which prevents from heat getting trapped. To test for heat regulation, we decided to enlist the help of our 50 polled owners of the Red Nomad 10-inch mattress to get their insights. Basically, we asked how hot the mattress feels for each individual, especially when they wake up in the middle of the night or first thing in the morning. Here’s what we found out:
- Slept cool - 35%
- Slept neutral - 40%
- Slept warm - 16%
- Slept hot - 9%
Pretty impressive results! 91% of sleepers noted either sleeping cool, neutral, or warm. 6% noted feeling hot but not uncomfortable, and 3% said it feels too hot.
Total points awarded for Heat Regulation: 18.5 / 20
Zen Score of the Red Nomad 10-inch Memory Foam Mattress
A memory foam mattress must pass a Zen Score of 70 in order to be recommended by us at Zen Sleeping. The Red Nomad 10-inch Memory Foam Mattress passes our benchmark with a total Zen Score of 95!
Be sure to leave a comment below if you have any questions or concerns.
