Forget expensive sleepbuds. Buy this pillow instead

Tech companies love to sell us expensive gadgets to solve all of life’s little problems. Sleepbuds sold by the likes of Anker and Ozlo are a good example. These miniature marvels of engineering sit flush in the ear, and allow side-sleepers to doze off listening to podcasts, audiobooks, music, or white noise without annoying their partner. But why pay over $200 for a second pair of highly specialized buds when you can spend a fraction of that for a product that never needs charging, never loses its Bluetooth connection, and won’t need replacing in a few years after the battery wears out?

Piercing pillows, as the name suggests, promise pain relief for anyone with a freshly pierced ear. They feature cutouts that suspend the ear while sleeping, to avoid putting pressure on the sensitive tissue. I’m here to tell you that they also work great with bulbous AirPods, Galaxy Buds, Pixel Buds, and any other modern earbuds you might already own.

There are dozens of piercing pillows to choose from in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and firmness. I bought the $55 Ear Pillow from Blissbury for a few reasons, primarily because it has two ear cutouts for added flexibility.

I sleep in two side positions. One I like to call the authoritarian cuddle, where my bottom arm is fully extended under one side of the pillow while my top arm strangles the other side. The second is just an unsprung fetal position. Blissbury’s piercing pillow accommodates both positions nicely.

I also like that the cutouts fall just below the centerline allowing the holes to align naturally with my ears when the pillow is nestled up against my shoulder. That makes the earholes relatively easy to locate when tossing and turning at night.

The memory foam used in the Ear Pillow also suits my preference for a relatively thick, firm pillow — though I do wish it was as firm as the $59.99 Ikea Klubbsporre pillow it replaces. The Blissbury’s thickness is adjustable between 4 and 5 inches using a removable insert. The outer cover of the Ear Pillow can be removed and washed as required.

The Ear Pillow is 26 inches (66cm) long and 15 inches (38cm) wide, which makes it slightly narrower than a US Standard pillow. That means a Standard pillowcase will sag a bit, which is good because the extra fabric can be stuffed into the earholes. I use mine with a pillowcase that matches my bedding because I’ve been told that’s what full-grown adults do. Blissbury ships the pillow with foam fillers for the holes in case the Ear Pillow ever gets demoted to a guest pillow.

Sleepbuds might still be the way to go if your partner snores, however. I found the Soundcore Sleep A30’s masking algorithms to be very effective at canceling out light to moderate snoring. Just know that even the latest sleepbuds often require side-sleepers to adjust their pillows just so to make sure the pressure isn’t too acute and the audio isn’t muffled.

I’ve been a dedicated user of Anker’s A30 sleepbuds for almost a year. After a bumpy start, a flurry of firmware updates corrected most of the early issues. But there’s no amount of software that can overcome the inherent limits of devices that require drivers and batteries that are much smaller than traditional earbuds. Having spent a week with the Blissbury pillow, I now feel silly for spending 4x the amount on earbuds that are inferior to the AirPods Pro I already owned.

The makers of consumer electronics would love for us to believe that only they can smooth out the friction of modern life. But sometimes, all you really need is an oddly shaped piece of foam.

All photos by Thomas Ricker / The Verge