The bottom line: The Bear Original mattress is a great choice for athletes and people with an active lifestyle looking for a recovery mattress. This memory foam mattress cools you down at night while the celliant cover improves blood flow and muscle recovery, allowing you to wake up refreshed.

Who Is the Bear Mattress Best for?

Bear is best for:	Bear may not be best for:
People with an active lifestyle Those with joint pain Hot sleepers Combination sleepers	Couples or those who sleep with a partner Side sleepers Heavier people

Bear Mattress Review Highlights

The Bear Original mattress is one of the best mattresses for athletes and is also a great mattress for back pain. This bed-in-a-box has a high customer rating, and in this review, we’ll explore why. We’ll cover important factors about Bear, including how it scored in our Mattress Advisor lab testing, sizes, prices, pros and cons, and even some FAQs to help you find out if Bear is the bed for you. Read on for more about what we thought of this medium-firm memory foam bed.

What We Love About the Bear Original:

• Bear is a great mattress for athletes or people with active lifestyles because of its pressure-relieving properties, cooling properties, and muscle recovery technology. But really, anyone can benefit from these features.
• The mattress cover is made with Celliant® fibers, which reflect infrared light back to the body to promote blood circulation and improve muscle recovery. This can help you wake up feeling better rested, regardless of your fitness level.
• Bear claims that its open-cell response foam increases cooling and conductivity up to 7x more than traditional foam mattresses. It’s a pretty impressive stat, and we’ve seen some evidence to back it up—in our testing we found that the mattress actually feels cool to the touch.

Video Review of the Bear Mattress

See how the Bear Original performed in our mattress tests to help you determine if this could be the mattress for you.

Testing Scores

Here’s how the Bear Original mattress scored on different tests and evaluations. Our score is a weighted average out of 10 that incorporates functional and performance characteristics of the mattress, as well as a social responsibility score, which takes into account social mission, community involvement and charitable partnerships.

Read about our review process.

Mattress Advisor Test	Score (Out of 10)
Shipping	10
Trial Period	9
Return Policy	10
Warranty	9
Set-Up	7
Motion Transfer	7.75
Edge Support	8.5
Pressure Relief	7
Spine Alignment	8.5
Responsiveness	9
Cooling	9
Durability	8
Customer Service	9
Social Impact	6

⭐Total Score for the Bear Original Mattress: 8.6/10⭐

Pros and Cons

✅ Pros

• Returns: Bear offers an easy, hassle-free return policy for their mattress. Should you decide to return Bear, they will locate a charity for your bed to be donated to and arrange a pickup for free.
• Spine alignment: Bear scored well in our spine alignment test, meaning when you sleep on your side, your spine should be nearly straight, and when you sleep on your back your spine should maintain its natural curve. This is just one of the reasons we recommend this mattress to side and back sleepers, alike.
• Responsiveness: Although Bear is a memory foam mattress, it scored an impressive 9 out of 10 in responsiveness, meaning it easily adjusts to your movements. It’s easy to change positions on this bed.
• Cooling: Bear accomplished another amazing feat for a memory foam bed—it sleeps cool. This is great for people who suffer from night sweats or kicking off their blankets at night.

❌ Cons

• Off-gassing: When you unbox the Bear mattress, you will notice an off-gassing odor. This is normal with all-foam mattresses and should go away within a few hours.
• Social impact: Apart from donating 1% of sales to Good Sports Charity, Bear doesn’t do much in the social impact world.
• Motion transfer: Bear did not score as well in motion isolation, meaning it may not be the best choice for couples and co-sleepers. When you move around on the Bear mattress, your partner is likely to feel some ripples of motion.

Product Information

Let’s dig deeper into what makes the Bear mattress work and who it works for.

How Firm is the Bear Original Mattress?

The mattress is about a 6.5 out of 10 on the firmness scale, making the mattress medium-firm. This firmness works for most sleeping positions because it falls close to the middle.

What Sleeping Position Does It Support?

• Combination Sleepers: We found that the mattress scored well in our test for responsiveness (9/10)—which is somewhat rare for an all-foam bed. The high responsiveness of the Bear mattress makes it a great mattress for combination sleepers and people who toss and turn.
• Back Sleepers: The Bear’s 6.5/10 firmness positions it as a “medium-firm mattress,” which tends to be the firmness that most sleepers prefer. In our testing we found that the mattress is ideal for back sleepers of all sizes.
• Some Stomach Sleepers: It also works well for some stomach sleepers—particularly lightweight and average weight stomach sleepers—though others (including heavier stomach sleepers) might prefer a slightly firmer bed.
• Some Side Sleepers: For side sleepers, things get a bit more complicated. Some side sleepers might find the mattress doesn’t supply good pressure relief around the hips and shoulders. We found this to be an issue for heavier side sleepers in particular. Lightweight and average weight side sleepers might also find this to be true, or they might feel comfortable and experience no buildup of pain or discomfort when resting in a side position. Read our best mattresses for side sleepers recommendations for better options.

Pain Relief

The Bear Mattress is much touted for its ability to foster recovery, particularly in athletes. But regardless of how fast you can run a mile or how much weight you can deadlift, you can benefit from some of the Bear’s features.

Back sleepers who suffer from back pain in particular will find that the bed supplies good spine alignment—so much so that we gave it an 8.5/10 in this category overall. The bed’s gel foam top layer relieves stress and tension, while the firmer foam layers beneath maintain good support.

However, for those who suffer from hip or shoulder pain, the mattress might not supply enough pressure relief—particularly if you’re a side sleeper. If you tend to sleep on your side and have chronic hip or shoulder pain, we recommend you seek a softer mattress or something from our list of best mattresses for side sleepers.

That said, overall the mattress is a good one for joint pain. In addition to those foam support layers, the mattress also has an infrared responsive cover, which is designed to help improve your circulation—though we weren’t able to test this feature in our lab.

Spine Alignment

As mentioned when talking about pressure relief, we found that the Bear effectively keeps your spine in good alignment when lying on your back or side. The top foam layer adapts to the shape of your back and to a lesser extent, your hips; while the denser foam layers beneath provide good lumbar support. The only alignment issues we found in testing the Bear were for heavier stomach sleepers. Because your hips will sink farther into the Bear’s comfort layer, it’s hard to maintain good alignment when resting on your stomach.

Edge Support

The Bear earned an 8.5/10 in our test for edge support, which is above average when compared to other mattresses we’ve tested. Bear’s score suggests that it’s easy to spread out and sleep on the far edges of this mattress—or sit on its side without slipping off.

Motion Transfer

To test motion transfer, we rest a cup of water on the mattress and see how much movement and bouncing it takes to disrupt the cup. Bear scored just below average in our test, which is a surprise given that memory foam tends to score well here due to its dampening qualities. This indicates that if you share your Bear mattress with a partner or pet, you might experience some disruptions from their movements.

Does the Bear Original Mattress Sleep Hot?

Bear is a memory foam mattress made with a mix of graphite-infused foam, open-cell foam that provides high airflow, and a Celliant cover that absorbs body heat. While memory foam usually sleeps hot, these materials allow Bear to sleep cooler than most but not cooler than innerspring or latex beds.

How Much Weight Does it Support?

The Bear mattress doesn’t have a set weight limit, but being a memory foam mattress that is only 10 inches thick, it may not be the best choice for heavier sleepers.

What Foundations of Bed Frames Can be Used?

The Bear mattress is ideally paired with the Bear foundation but will also work just fine with any flat or slatted frame/foundation since it is memory foam. You can also use it right on the floor. Bear does not work well with a traditional box spring, however.

What is the Bear Original Made of?

The Bear mattress is a memory foam mattress with four different foam layers that provides cooling comfort, contouring pressure relief, and core support. All foams used in Bear are CertiPUR-US certified for harmful chemicals and emissions.

Bear Original Mattress Sizes, Dimensions, and Pricing

Size	Dimensions	Weight	Price*
Twin	39” x 75” x 10”	50 lbs.	$748
Twin XL	39” x 80” x 10”	50 lbs.	$811
Full	54” x 75” x 10”	60 lbs.	$873
Queen	60” x 80” x 10”	70 lbs.	$998
King	76” x 80” x 10”	90 lbs.	$1,248
Cal King	72” x 84” x 10”	90 lbs.	$1,248
Split King	76″ x 80″ x 14″	140 lbs.	$1,622

*Prices do not reflect exclusive offers or Bear mattress coupons. Click below to see the best price for the Bear Original mattress.

Unboxing

Bear arrives at your door in a 40” x 20” x 20” box. It took us about 3 minutes to unbox the mattress on our foundation. We recommend doing this with a partner as Bear weighs 70 pounds for a queen size. We did notice an off-gassing odor, so we recommend letting your bed air out before making it up.

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Purchasing Information

Here’s a quick rundown of the crucial purchasing info.

Policy	Details
Delivery	Compressed and rolled in a box, delivered in 4-7 business days
Trial Period	120-night trial
Warranty	Lifetime limited warranty
Return Policy	Free returns
Financing	Available through Affirm

Shipping and Delivery

The Bear mattress ships free to the lower 48 states through FedEx, and will be at your door in 4-7 business days. If you live in Alaska, Hawaii, or Canada, there will be a shipping fee. When your mattress arrives at your door, you don’t have to be home to sign for it, unless you would like to.

Bear does offer white glove delivery service and mattress removal for a one-time fee of $150. This fee includes set-up of any bed bases as well.

Sleep Trial

Bear offers a 120-night risk-free mattress trial starting from the day you receive your mattress. They do ask that you sleep on the mattress for at least 30 nights, as your body may need some time to adjust to the feel and support.

Warranty

The Bear mattress comes with a lifetime limited warranty. You can read more about the warranty policy here.

Customer Service

To contact Bear’s customer service either live chat with them on Bear website, call 884-311-0035, or email support@bearmattress.com.

Return Policy

If you’re not completely satisfied within the first 100 days, call the customer service number and Bear will arrange for someone to come pick up the mattress and refund your money in full.

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