Buckwheat or Millet: Which Hull Fills Better?

Circadian: Hold a handful of each, and you can feel the answer. Buckwheat or millet, which hull fills a better pillow? For holding your neck in line all night, buckwheat. Each hull flexes under your head, then locks against the hulls around it, so the height you set at bedtime is the height you're still lying at when the alarm goes off in the morning. Millet hulls are smaller and rounder. They slide instead of locking. So millet's quieter and softer, and buckwheat's firmer and cooler.

Circadian: We make buckwheat pillows and we don't make a millet one, so weigh what we say. But it all comes down to the shape of one tiny shell. Look at a standard buckwheat hull up close. It's a hard little shell with three sides, three edges and a point. Ours are pre-polished into flatter flakes, but every piece still has hard edges. Now picture hundreds of thousands of them in one pillow. When your head comes down, the hulls under it flex a little, so the pillow shapes itself around your skull and neck.

Circadian: Then they stop. Why do they stop? Because every piece has edges, it catches on the hulls next to it, and the whole pile locks in place. So the pillow doesn't keep sinking as the night goes on. Which means your neck stays at the height you picked, whether you fall asleep on your back or roll onto your side halfway through the night. In our opinion, that locking is the best thing a pillow can do for your neck. Hundreds of thousands of buckwheat hulls add up, too.

Circadian: Our Standard weighs about ten pounds, the heaviest fill we make. Millet's a grain grown for food all over the world. Like buckwheat, the hull is the outer shell that comes off when the grain is milled. So both fills start as something that'd otherwise go to waste. But a millet hull is much smaller, and it's round and smooth. Pour a handful and it runs through your fingers almost like sand. So inside a pillow, millet packs tighter, and when you press on it, the hulls roll aside instead of catching on each other, which gives you a softer, more cushioned feel that some sleepers prefer.

Circadian: The catch? The height you set can settle more under the steady weight of a head. A Standard millet pillow's lighter too, about seven pounds, against buckwheat's ten. And there's a gap in the research. We looked, and we couldn't find a single peer-reviewed study that names millet hull pillows. Buckwheat hulls have several. So for millet, most of what you'll read comes from the people selling it. Buckwheat. Buckwheat hulls stack loosely, which leaves thousands of small gaps between them, and air keeps moving through those gaps all night long, without a gel pack or a cooling insert anywhere in the pillow.

Circadian: That airflow's why our buckwheat pillow is the coolest pillow we make. Millet's small round hulls pack closer together, so there's less room for air. Nobody's measured a millet pillow's temperature, though, so treat that part as a guess from the shape. Do you wake up hot? Then pick the hull with the gaps. This is millet's side of the argument, and it's a fair one. Small, smooth hulls make less noise when they move, and they give more under your cheek.

Circadian: Share a bed with a light sleeper? That matters. Standard buckwheat hulls are rougher, so they crunch more when you turn your head. Ours are pre-polished and air-jet cleaned by a patented process, which gives up to sixty-eight percent less crunch than standard hulls, by our own testing. Want quiet and soft without losing buckwheat's support? That's our Buckwool pillow. It's two flat layers, buckwheat hulls in one and soft organic wool in the layer above, so you just flip it over to pick the side you want that night.

Circadian: A load of our buckwheat hulls lasts about three to five years. Millet sellers give their own lifespans, and they don't agree with each other. So what happens after that? With buckwheat, you open the zipper, take out the tired hulls, pour in a fresh bag of the same pre-polished hulls we fill our pillows with, and zip it back up, and the pillow you already know feels new again. Say you sleep on your side, you run hot, and you wake up with a stiff neck most mornings.

Circadian: Buckwheat fits you. It holds the gap between your shoulder and your head, and it stays cool doing it. Now say you're new to hull pillows, or quiet matters more to you than firm support. That's where people look at millet. Our answer for that sleeper is the Buckwool, with soft wool for most nights and hulls on the nights you want more hold. Our founder tested the hulls in twenty buckwheat pillows by hand, ours among them, without knowing which brand was which, and he poured and weighed every batch, pressed each one under a load to see how fast it flattened, and listened to how loud it was.

Circadian: Your pillow arrives full, with about thirty percent more hulls than most people keep. So lie down on it first. Head tipped up? Unzip the end and scoop out a cup of hulls. Lie down again. Keep going until your head sits level with your spine, in the position you sleep in. Then keep the extra hulls in a jar, in case you want them back. So which feels right to you: firm and held, or soft and quiet?