Here at The Foam Shop®, we’ve taken customer education seriously since 1974 and want to help clear the air on the differences between high-quality and lower-quality natural latex foam to help you make informed decisions.
With the ongoing increase in consumer and environmental awareness, more and more products are appearing in stores and online these days being marketed as “natural latex.” But is every natural foam fully natural? And how can you separate the higher quality natural foam products from the lower?
The Foam Shop® Facts
How you make natural latex foam matters (big time)
There are two different methods of making latex foam, regardless of the final product being natural or a synthetic blend: the Talalay process and the Dunlop process.
In the case of our Harmony Natural Mattress, we use the Talalay method because, although it’s more expensive, it produces a far superior natural product. A product that results in our NaturalCell benefits, offering:
Increased airflow and breathability – by allowing more air to pass through the open cell structure, you experiences better temperature regulation while you sleep.
Consistent comfort throughout the mattress – a flattened cell shape can create inconsistent clumps of cells – which creates inconsistent support, firmness and pressure points – depending on how the cells fall into place. The NaturalCells are evenly dispersed throughout the mattress, eliminating these problems.
Increased durability and longevity – the spherical cell shape is a stronger, longer-lasting, more supportive cell shape. This means your mattress will last longer and be more comfortable
Double the life of your mattress – The Talalay process also gives you the added benefit of doubling the life of your mattress by being able to flip it over. Both sides of your Harmony Mattress will offer the same comfort and support, due to the even distribution of our NaturalCells. A Dunlop made latex would be much firmer on the bottom due to the densification that occurs.
Natural Foam Fiction
All Latex foam is natural
One of the first steps in creating a latex foam mattress is gathering the ingredients and creating a liquid latex mixture that will be poured into a mattress mold. While the primary ingredient will almost always be liquid latex, many manufacturers will add in synthetic components or additives to their recipe (up to 60% of the mixture in many cases). These synthetic components make the product less expensive to manufacture. The final product is still made from natural latex, but it is not 100% natural through and through, and that makes a big difference.
All Latex foam is treated the same before you buy it
Latex products are bulky. They take up a lot of space on the shelf, so they are expensive to stock. In an effort to reduce these storage costs, some manufacturers, and even some retailers, now keep their foam products compressed on the shelf waiting to be shipped or sold.
These long term storage savings come at a price: the foam’s performance and your comfort. Latex foam isn’t meant to remain compressed for extended periods of time. This damages the cell structure of the foam causing the product to lose its ability to bounce back.
Our test results show that after two months of compression, latex foam can lose up to 55% of its ability to perform. Despite this, some retailers are still selling compressed foam products well beyond the six-month mark. At The Foam Shop®, we love our foams, so we keep them protected and uncompressed while they wait for you. We exercise a safe, compress-to-order shipping system, which dramatically minimizes product compression time, protects the comfort and quality of our foams, and saves you money on shipping costs.
The Foam Shop® Promise
The Foam Shop®’s Harmony Natural Latex is held to the highest quality standards. We promise it to be:
- Certified as a 100% natural foam, pure of any synthetic additives or binders.
- Manufactured in a Talalay process, resulting in our numerous NaturalCell benefits.
- Never compressed or compromised for storage.