TikTok Convinced Me To Vacuum My Mattress, What Came Next Was Disgusting
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I would describe myself as a relatively clean person. I wipe down my countertops nightly and wash my towels regularly. But I'm going to majorly call myself out here—one cleaning step I had never tried was vacuuming my mattress. After one too many pointed videos surfaced on my TikTok algorithm about how crucial it was to complete the task every month, and with a new vacuum I was eager to try out, I decided to give it a go one morning between laundry cycles.
Apparently, it was about time. According to April Mayer, an expert at retailer Amerisleep, “By regularly vacuuming your mattress, you can significantly reduce the buildup of these allergens and irritants, creating a cleaner and healthier sleeping environment. A clean mattress not only improves the air quality in your bedroom but also helps to minimize the risk of allergic reactions and respiratory problems."
What might these irritants and allergens be? Dust, for one thing. Also, everyone sheds their skin' it's a normal part of our skin's renewal process. And I have very dry skin. Like, very dry, meaning my skin sheds, well, a lot. While this isn't necessarily a problem, in the winter, when the air and my skin are noticeably drier, I find that my apartment accumulates dust quite quickly. I keep an air purifier running, which helps, but what I didn't realize was that my mattress holds onto dust, debris, and allergens in the same way an area rug does. After one pass around my mattress with my new Shark vacuum, the debris container was already full of a very fine, beige, powder—a combination of baking soda, dead skin cells, and dust. The results were, while so satisfying, incredibly disgusting.
The Shark UltraCyclone Pet Pro Cordless Handheld Vacuum—which is technically more adept at tackling pet hair and allergens than dust and dead skin—was my tool of choice for this endeavor. There are mattress-specific vacuum models, but I couldn't justify buying yet another cleaning appliance that would only accomplish one task. And I figured I'd be fine with my Shark; when it comes to a mattress, handheld models are much easier to navigate than traditional stick vacuums, especially when you have to put a little weight behind them to reach all the mattress crooks and crevices.
UltraCyclone Pro Cordless Handheld Vacuum
The cleaning influencers on my feed recommended sprinkling baking soda on the mattress surface before vacuuming, to neutralize odors and gives the surface a longer-lasting clean. While some experts suggest leaving the powder on for a few hours, I only left it on for 20 minutes, and I already noticed a fresher smell in my bedroom.
When it was time to actually vacuum, I worked my way across the mattress in long passes, pressing down on the vacuum as I went so it would reach all of the indenting stitch lines. I worked from top to bottom, focusing my primary efforts on the head and side where I sleep most often.
After the results of the first attempt shocked me to my germophobic core, I decided to try and vacuum my mattress every time I changed my bedsheets (biweekly). The vacuuming and baking soda combination is also expected to prolong my mattress’s lifespan. In my own personal experience, and in this instance, expert—and Tik Tok—advice has proven to be true, the regular mattress maintenance has definitely helped both my sleep comfort levels and my constant runny nose.
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