Katharine wrote:I considered a buckwheat hull pillow once for my neck. But after some people described them as hard, I wasn't sure if they'd work for me, especially since I'd never been able to see/touch one in person ("hard" is one of the triggers for my neck). --- I prefer pillows with a filling I can move around to suit rather than an immovable lump of batting or foam.
You're right; you'd have to try one to find out. But let me offer some insights in the meantime:
Those who describe the sobagara-makura, or buckwheat hull pillow, as "hard" may not have explored its full potential, because it's just like a bean bag, and bean bags are of course malleable. A buckwheat hull pillow needn't simply lie featureless: like a bean bag, it can conform in any way you like to your head and neck; the firmness is what gives support. So it might actually be what you're looking for. TBH, I was quite surprised at how comfortable I found it, and for me the filling's natural woody/grassy scent was comforting. But that's just me; YMMV. Some people just don't like them; others rave. My personal opinion? Negative reviews are either going to be from those who are genuinely very sensitive to certain stimuli such as sound or smell; or maybe they didn't think to explore the pillow's beanbag-like potential; or at worst they're going to be that species of Internet troll who thrives on badmouthing any old thing simply for the sport of putting a turd in the punchbowl. So needless to say, there's also going to be misinformation - no doubt some of it well-intentioned, but misinformation nonetheless: For example, contrary to what some mistakenly say, a reputable maker's filling will NOT be the unhulled seeds, but only the hulls alone. I mean, think about it: seeds would be the waste of a precious food resource; hulls are something that would otherwise be thrown away, but here find a use. This misunderstanding is why I dislike doing the lazy thing by simply calling them buckwheat pillows; it's too easy for the uninformed to jump to wrong conclusions. It's not that herculean a task to add a space and type "hull".
Personal, first-hand experience is really the only way for you to know if you'll like it. Some companies might have return policies, which is an attractive possibility. Be aware of sourcing, though: look for thoroughly-cleansed and preferably organically-raised hulls, because cheaper imported hulls will often have been fumigated or otherwise exposed to hazardous chemicals. The pillow should also be sunned outdoors from time to time to help reduce any accumulated moisture retention in the filling, and to forestall mildew. That said, I was lazy and never sunned my pillow, yet never experienced any mold, mildew, or other unpleasantness. But it bears saying all the same; forewarned is forearmed. We
are dealing with natural materials, after all.
As in the picture I showed earlier, some of these pillows' shells come with zippers nowadays, and that's what I'd go with, because that way you can easily add or remove hulls to suit your comfort level. So if a zippered pillow comes to you stuffed too full for your liking, no worries; you still get to modify the pillow's volume if and as you like. Just don't throw away the hulls you take out, though, because later on you might want to put some back in.
Hope that helps.
When I was an exchange student in Japan, our dorm bedding included a very odd but decidedly modernistic take on the traditional buckwheat hull pillow concept: a mesh bag filled with short little plastic tubes not unlike the licorice candy called Snaps, for those of you who know of it:
Size pictured is enlarged, and the tubes weren't as psychedelic, but were colorless and translucent. Just giving you the general idea, here. Now I want some Snaps.
Anyway, I was already personally familiar with buckwheat hull pillows, so I recognized the fundamental concept right away, but when I first saw this tubelets-in-mesh iteration I was most dubious:
How on Earth, I thought,
can hard plastic tubelets be comfortable? Buckwheat hulls, I get. But to my surprise, somehow it actually worked, and interestingly, the tubes weren't an instrusive sensation. To this day I can't figure that out. And as you might imagine, it was well-aerated, which added to the comfort. And cleaning, of course, would be a [*ahem*] snap. Jut pop it in the washing machine. Still, though - it doesn't get any more institutional than that. It might have been comfortable, but it never rose to the level of being my friend: it was just this dystopian, synthetic ...
thing. I'll bet you get those in jail, too - but I'm afraid I was too slippery to get caught, so I never had the actual pleasure of finding out.
It only now occurs to me that I don't recall ever discussing those bizarre little pillows from Mars with my fellow exchange students, so they must have made the adjustment with only culture clash for trouble, just as I had.
"If you take music out of this world, you will have nothing but a ball of fire." - Balochi musician