CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE –  The John Lewis & Partners Synthetic Soft Like Down Standard PillowJohn Lewis & Partners Synthetic Soft Like Down Standard Pillow comes in different levels of support – soft / medium and medium / hard.  At £20 per pillow, these are slightly cheaper, super soft and offer you the opportunity to choose the right support for you.

So, we all like the luxurious feel of super-soft down pillows but find them a bit pricey, step-forward the ‘feels like down pillow’ from Jasper Conran at Debenhams. A microfibre filled pillow which promises to offer the benefits of synthetic filling but with a ‘down experience’ for less than £25 a pillow. Sounds too good to be true – let’s give it a test.

Debenhams sells these as a pair and like most of their products it’s simply and nicely presented. Straight out of the pack, the pillows feel remarkably softer than your standard polyester pillows, no doubt this has something to do with the 280 thread count cotton cover which adds that noticeable level of luxury.

This soft feeling is kept when squashing the pillow with your hands; like down pillows they are quite plump and have a lot of give – they squash down a lot, giving that ultra-soft airy feeling. So far so good.

When you take your head off the pillow though, it tends to bounce back to close to its original shape, something that down pillows don’t tend to do as much. You don’t leave an impression of your head in it. This isn’t a bad thing at all but is just different to how down pillows tend to react.

Using this pillow overnight worked really well. It bounced back into shape much more readily whilst remaining soft.

Overall I really like this pillow. If you compare it side by side to down, it’s not the same, it’s obviously different, but it does come close to down for softness, but with the added benefit of synthetic – for example, there are some amongst us who suffer from allergies and don’t get on with down pillows, this would be a pretty good alternative.

Overall – not exactly the  down experience, but very good none the less especially for budget concious and allergy sufferers. Highly recommended.