I Tried an Air Purifying Headboard — Here’s What It Was Like

A few weeks ago I tried out a brand-new invention — the AirTulip headboard — which now sits at the head of my bed. Invented by Arjen de Jong, a Dutch aerospace engineer who is now based in New York City, the AirTulip takes the highest level of air purification technology and brings it to the bedroom. The company claims that this air, which gently wafts over you while you sleep, is 1,000 times cleaner than what comes out of a traditional air purifier. 

AirTulip is a soft fabric headboard with a built-in air purifier. Arjen’s been working on this project for the past five years, and recently appeared on Shark Tank (you can watch the video here). The $2,990 design squeezes a large, slow-moving fan on the floor at the head of the bed, which takes in ambient air from both sides and passes it through multiple filters to create an ultra-clean environment over your body as you sleep. 

The AirTulip has four filter levels, the last two of which have a large surface area right behind the headboard. The large area allows for purified air to pass evenly and slowly through the headboard so that you can’t even really feel it on your face. The entire unit is silent and includes a daytime setting and a sleep setting, as it will purify the air in your bedroom 100% of the time even when you’re not sleeping. 

Sleeping in clean air can have a big impact on a number of things — the central one being that you can sleep better. According to AirTulip’s testing, it can help reduce allergy and asthma symptoms, help you recover quickly after strenuous exercise, and even help reduce snoring and sleep apnea — although my snoring hasn’t gone away quite yet!

I was initially skeptical of what sleeping in front of essentially a large air purifier would be like; I had visions of sleeping in front of a noisy AC unit in my old apartment on hot summer nights. Thankfully, the AirTulip is nothing like any of that. It is a silent, super-relaxing environment to sleep in, and while it’s hard to describe breathing clean air I definitely could feel the sort of “freshness” to the air around me as I lay in bed, and just knowing that it was clean had a very relaxing impact. 

This was after I realized how dirty the air in my apartment was! 

To help with my testing Arjen also loaned me an Extech Particle Counter, which costs almost $1,000 and is able to measure air quality down to the most minute particles. We have three air purifiers that constantly run in our apartment, so I was very surprised when I saw how dirty the air in our apartment was. 

This is outdoor air, where the smallest particles average about 16,000 on a regular day in New York City. This reading came in at 17,234 and there was some smog in the air. 

Indoor air should measure about 7,000, but ours was constantly reading higher. I wasn’t totally surprised. as I could actually see dust particles in the air as the sunlight came through the windows. So much for our air purifiers! This was a bad sign, and it meant I really had to replace all the filters in my purifiers, which had gotten quite dirty.

This is the counter at the head of the AirTulip headboard — 0. This measurement blew me away and was just the proof of concept that I needed. 

The AirTulip is not a cheap purchase, but it’s an extremely high-quality, super-useful addition to your home if you have any issues with allergies, asthma, or sleeping in general. I believe it can only help you sleep better and keep your home cleaner all around, too. I’ve been sleeping with it for a few weeks and very much prefer it to my bed when it just had our standard headboard.