How to Choose Your Perfect Eye Pillow

What’s inside an eye pillow

The eye pillow filling is an important consideration. At The Norfolk Eye Pillow Company we’ve chosen to use wheat as the filling – because a weighted eye pillow exerts gentle pressure and fits the contours and curves of your eyes and face nicely, without being overly heavy. Wheat also retains heat really well, if you want to intensify the experience by warming the eye pillow in the microwave or oven first. Of course, we use organic wheat to make sure there are no nasty chemicals anywhere near your eyes, or on the delicate skin around your eyes.

Living in Norfolk, we know that there’s nothing like the sight and smell of a field of lavender to lift our spirits. Consulting with an aromatherapist bore this feeling out; we learnt that not only is lavender considered to be excellent for relaxation and releasing headaches, but it’s also thought to be good for anxiety and depression. That’s why we use several spoonfuls of the finest organic lavender in every lavender eye pillow – ensuring that the aroma stays with you and the benefits are every bit as good as they can be.

The cover of your eye pillow 

Given the sensitivity of the eyes to chemicals, and the skin around the eyes, we strongly suggest choosing a natural fabric. Avoid the feel of anything ‘silky’, which might well turn out to be a polyester. Polyesters use harsh dyes, because the fibre won’t bond with anything subtle, and the manufacturers use harsh chemicals to soften them up. Traces of these chemical processes get stuck in the fabric and can easily transfer onto you, entering through the thin skin around your eyes, as you lie there trying to relax. Both harsh chemicals and harsh dyes are not only bad for you, they are also very bad for the environment and the people that have to handle them.

Hopefully we’ve persuaded you to choose a natural fabric, but beware regular cotton – it isn’t much better. Conventionally grown cotton requires lots of synthetic fertilisers. Much of it ends up in the water, creating one of the world’s worst pollution problems, leading to oxygen free dead zones, making it impossible for aquatic communities to survive.

Organic cotton is one option, but, being an ethical and sustainable yoga shop, we wanted to go for the ultimate eco-friendly eye pillow. So we chose linen. Linen is made from flax fibres and is one of the most biodegradable and recyclable fabrics out there. It hates chemicals – it actually makes the crops weaker when they are treated with chemicals, so they aren’t. All it needs is rainwater to thrive. It’s strong so it doesn't need starching during spinning and weaving, and this strength means it will last much longer than cotton so it’s less likely to end up in landfill; in fact, it gets stronger every time it’s washed! And it absorbs moisture without holding bacteria – which makes it a good choice around sensitive and infection-prone eyes.

Why choose one of our eye pillows!

The softest of French flax linens. The soft weight of organic wheat. The scent of organic lavender. The embroidered reminders of what’s truly important in life - Peace, Love, Happiness. The reminder to Breathe. Our eye pillow is designed to help you create an oasis moment wherever you are. Keep one by your bed or carry one in your bag to use anytime.