Who the Comfort Bubble Memory suits
Most of The Foam People range is medium. The Comfort Bubble Memory is the one model built to be softer, and it is the mattress to buy from them if you sleep on your side, wake with a sore shoulder or hip, or simply find a medium mattress too hard. At £200 for a double it costs the same as the Superior Cashmere, so the choice between the two is a choice of feel: the Cashmere is medium with a plush cover, this is genuinely medium-soft through its top 5cm.
It is the wrong mattress for front sleepers, who need a firmer surface to keep the hips up, and for heavier sleepers, who will push through the memory foam to the base. If that is you, the Comfort Ortho Firm is the Foam People model to look at instead. Our best soft mattress page sets it against the softer options from other brands.
Construction and materials
Two layers, 20cm in total: a 5cm memory foam top with a bubble-profiled surface, over a 15cm supportive base foam. The profiling is the same idea as on the cheaper Core Bubble Memory and the Aerotac Superior Bubble: the top of the memory foam is cut into rounded domes rather than left flat, so there is less foam in contact with you, a softer initial feel, and channels for air to move through.
What separates this from the Core Bubble Memory is depth and the thickness of the comfort layer. The Core is 15cm deep with a thin memory layer; this has 5cm of memory foam over a base that is itself as deep as the whole Core mattress. That is the difference between a guest-room mattress and one you can sleep on every night.
Comfort and support
We score it 8.7 for comfort and 8.2 for support. On your side, the shoulder and hip sink into the memory foam and the waist is held, which is the whole point of a softer mattress and something no medium model in this range does as well. The base foam stops the sink becoming a sag: lying on your back, the hips stay level rather than dropping below the shoulders. For a lighter or average-weight adult, the support figure is a fair one.
The ceiling is weight. The softer the comfort layer, the sooner a heavier body reaches the base, and above roughly 15 stone this will feel like a medium-firm foam mattress with a soft skin rather than a soft mattress. Our body weight and mattress choice guide explains where the line falls.
Temperature
Memory foam sleeps warm, and a 5cm layer is more memory foam than most budget mattresses carry. The bubble profiling helps more than you would expect: with air able to move under the domes, it is noticeably cooler than a flat memory foam top of the same depth. It is still not a cooling mattress. If you run hot, the Comfort CoolMax Intelligent gives up some softness for a temperature-regulating cover at £8 less.
Edge support and motion isolation
Edge support is modest, as on any all-foam mattress with a soft top: sit on the side and the memory foam compresses, so you lose some usable width for sleeping right at the edge. Motion isolation is excellent, the best in the Foam People range, because the thick memory foam layer absorbs movement before it reaches your partner. For a couple where one person turns a lot, that is worth more than the edge.
Durability, trial and warranty
Memory foam softens a little over its first months and then settles; a 5cm layer over a firm base holds its shape better than the thin layers on cheaper models. Rotate it head to toe every couple of months (it cannot be flipped). The 5-year warranty is standard across the range, and so is the absence of a home trial, which matters more here than on a medium mattress because a soft feel is the one people most often get wrong. Buy it only if you know you want soft.
Our verdict
The Comfort Bubble Memory fills the gap in The Foam People range: a properly soft, properly deep all-foam mattress for side sleepers at £200. It scores 8.7 for comfort and 8.2 for support, and the only reason its value score is 8.4 rather than higher is that the Superior Cashmere is the same money and more versatile. If you want soft, this is the one; if you are not sure, the Cashmere is the safer buy.
