The Queen Rose U

I recently tested 10 pregnancy pillows of all shapes and sizes in a larger review of pregnancy pillows and found that the Queen Rose U-Shaped Pregnancy Pillow is the best pregnancy pillow overall.

Over my five pregnancies, I’ve tested more than 20 pregnancy pillows with no success—until now. The Queen Rose, a long U-shaped pregnancy pillow that extends both behind your head and down both sides to your feet, fulfills all the requirements needed for full support. Ahead, learn more about how this pillow performed in testing.

The Queen Rose U-Shaped Pregnancy Pillow offers full-body support with a cozy cover.

Trying to pick a pillow can be a vague, ambiguous guessing game full of unfulfilled marketing promises and expectations that quite literally fall flat. Choosing the best pregnancy pillow is no different. You want support for all your aching joints and pain points, but not so much that you feel like you are sleeping with a slab of concrete. You want this support in all the right places, but the right places vary from person to person, as we all have different bumps and different bodies in pregnancy and otherwise.

The Queen Rose is cozy but cooling, extra long to accommodate the most body types, large but not too large, supportive at each painful joint and includes additional features that help it to far outperform competitors. Read on to determine if this pillow might work for you, too, or better yet, how it might make the next 9 months much less painful and much more restful.

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Shape: U, extra long | Cover material: Velvet (cotton, sateen, jersey also available) | Filling material: Polyester | Dimensions: 65 x 31 x 7 inches (also available in 55- or 60-inch lengths) | Removable washable cover: Yes | Firmness: Quite firm

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The Queen Rose is a large and dense pregnancy pillow, making it heavy, but this weight is so worth it in terms of the support it offers. In my third trimester, I had my partner place it back onto the bed each night, because it was so heavy. But it was the only pillow that felt like it was just as supportive in the morning hours as it was the night before, in all the right places. This is necessary for those with moderate and severe pain in pregnancy, from pelvic and hip pain to round ligament pain and more. If you want a light, featherlike pillow to transport around the house, this isn't your pillow. If you want a supportive, cozy pillow to alleviate pain, the Queen Rose is it.

The support comes in multiple places: the head and neck, the chest and arm, the bump/belly itself, the hips and knees and down to the feet. Carson Meyer, a doula who has helped celebrities like Mandy Moore and Gigi Hadid and is also a nutrition consultant and founder of C & The Moon skincare, told me that it's essential to keep a pillow between the knees. If you can keep the feet separated as well, with the legs parallel entirely, that's even better. This helps the hips stay in alignment to prevent pain and keep your body in an optimal position for sleep, she explained. Other options, especially those shorter than this extra long 65-inch pillow, fell short by stopping before the feet, therefore angling the hips unnecessarily.

In addition, the Queen Rose has a very slightly elevated neck area, reducing the reflux common in pregnancy for those who want their head slightly higher than their body. This feature means you don't have to stack additional pillows, because yours is serving its purpose.

The U shape promises support on both sides of the body, even if you are rolling back and forth from one side to the other all night. For those who don't roll as much and stay put on one side, a J-shaped pregnancy pillow might offer sufficient support in a smaller size, such as the Leachco Snoogle, which I also loved.

The Queen Rose U-Shaped pregnancy pillow isn't petite but the author found it provided the ideal ... [+] support to pregnant bodies.

There is no world in which I would have picked a velvet pillow cover for sleeping, given that I typically run hot at night, both in general but especially during pregnancy. Yet when it arrived for testing, I was drawn to the Queen Rose's soft and cozy exterior. It's fabric is not velvet like a scratchy dress your mom made you wear as a kid (just me?) but rather like your favorite cozy blanket that you look forward to falling into at night. The velvet feels more lightweight than the word velvet implies, and it doesn't prevent cooling like I thought it would, compared to other cotton and polyester blends.

In fact, during a test to check how rapidly a pillow cooled down, I placed a hot water bottle heated to body temperature on each of the pregnancy pillow contenders and then removed it, monitoring how quickly the pillow cooled, and how drastically over time. The Queen Rose was one of the top three performing pillows in the cooling test. It had a substantial temperature drop of over 8 degrees in 5 minutes, compared to some that performed worse, such as another pillow that dropped only 0.8 degree in the first 5 minutes.

For those who aren't into velvet, or want even more cooling potential, Katie Elks, an expert fabric specialist and director of design and product development at Brooklinen, says to look for cotton pillow covers and polyester stuffing. The Queen Rose is available in a cotton cover, too, in a variety of colors.

Numerous shows and movies have portrayed the annoyed partner when they feel like they are sleeping with a third person in the bed during pregnancy thanks to the size of some of these U-shaped pillows. Though it's still quite large at 65 inches long, the Queen Rose is the least bulky of the large pregnancy pillows that I’ve tried. I know this because in the middle of the night, I can roll over the side of it to get out of bed, large bump and all, rather than moving the pillow off the bed. Though it's dense and supportive, it doesn't have the fluffy height of some other options. It slightly tapers the closer it gets to your feet, making it easier to cover yourself up with your blanket. So consider this the most svelte of all the big and honky U-shaped monstrosities, which can be helpful for you and your partner, especially if you don't have a massive bed.

The three best pregnancy pillows after testing came in a range of sizes that offer varying degrees ... [+] of support.

The Queen Rose was longer, firmer and sturdier than the other tested pillows. It provided the most full-body coverage, whether you are rolling back and forth all night or just need head-to-toe support. In addition, it was the coziest with its velvet fabric, compared to others that had cotton or cheaper-feeling material. This pillow has held up best after additional weeks of testing, showing no signs of breakdown or lumpiness in the pillow, even compared to my other favorite, the Leachco Snoogle.

The Queen Rose exhibited faster cooling features than others, making it quick to whisk away body heat in the night, with most other pillows cooling more slowly or less completely. Therefore, it was a superior choice to the others tested, especially if you want a full-size U-shaped pillow.

I slept on each pregnancy pillow for multiple nights (and snuck in a few naps, too). I also talked to perinatal and fabric experts to determine what types of pillows might be best for pregnant people.

I considered the following criteria to determine what makes the optimal pillow:

I have spent much of the past eight years pregnant or nursing, testing all the perinatal and infant products I could along the way. In my fifth pregnancy now, I tested the 10 pregnancy pillows for multiple nights each, and have tested over 10 more in previous pregnancies, giving me expertise and experience in judging exactly what's most comfortable for pregnant bellies at every stage, aching backs and other painful joints disrupting sleep. I also interviewed several experts while researching this piece, including Dr. Amir Marashi, an OB-GYN and founder of Cerē; Carson Meyer, the founder of C & The Moon skincare line; Katie Elks at Brooklinen; and Samantha Jacobsen, a physical therapist who works with perinatal women and athletes.

In addition, as a product journalist, I research and study the top-performing products in this industry, watching for new features and helpful items to aid our journeys to motherhood. I also sent several of the pregnancy pillows that tested best to two more pregnant moms to gather their feedback on how well each performed for them.

If you are experiencing joint or round ligament pain in pregnancy, it can be helpful to use a pregnancy pillow rather than stacking, moving and constantly rearranging a bunch of regular pillows. This is because pregnancy pillows often take care of four or more pain points that need support at the same time. Finally, pregnancy pillows can be used as extra support in an uncomfortable hospital bed with flat pillows, or after the baby is born for extra behind-the-back support, recovery support for a sore pelvis or back and even a nursing pillow.