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We’ve read through this guide and remain confident in our picks.
Falling asleep is hard enough without the thoughts of Monday meetings swarming around your head. Sadly, a sleep mask can’t cancel those meetings, but it’s still a helpful tool for trying to get some rest. After testing sleep masks for more than three years—with panels of people who have different head shapes and sleep preferences—we’ve never wavered from our top pick. The Nidra Deep Rest Eye Mask is the best option for most people looking for a sleep mask to use at home or on the go.
We focused on sleep masks for travel, but we chose picks that work just as well when you’re on a bed.
A good sleep mask blocks out most light, but a great sleep mask makes you forget you’re wearing it.
We asked several people with a variety of face and nose shapes to wear the masks we chose.
The mask lies directly on your face, so the softer it is, the better. We chose masks made of soft, breathable material.
Lightweight and contoured, this mask fits comfortably and blocks light well for a wide variety of face shapes (though it’s best for those who are sitting upright or sleeping on their back). Its deep eyecups allow your eyes to flutter during sleep.
*At the time of publishing, the price was $14.
The Nidra Deep Rest Eye Mask has been our top pick for more than three years. Unlike a flat sleep mask that rests directly on your eyelids, the Nidra has contoured eyecups that arch over your eyes, giving them space to move. This design makes the Nidra mask more comfortable to sleep in, especially when you’re sitting upright as you would while traveling. In our tests, its deep cups, unstructured nose gap, and wider overall design helped it create a better fit on a wider variety of faces compared with other structured masks. And its adjustable Velcro strap keeps the mask from falling off if you toss and turn or if you’re sleeping upright. Some restless sleepers and stomach-sleepers reported that the lightweight mask could get knocked off their face at some point during the night. But if the Nidra fits you, its weightless feel can make you forget you’re wearing a sleep mask as you drift off in bright rooms or fluorescent plane cabins.
A silken exterior material, a flat design, and an adjustable strap make this mask a fit for almost any face, but it puts pressure on the eyes.
If the Nidra Deep Rest doesn’t fit your face quite right, or if you’re a stomach-sleeper, we also recommend the Alaska Bear Natural Silk Sleep Mask. It lacks contoured eyecups and thus applies some pressure to the eyes overnight like any regular eye mask does. But its flat design easily conforms to fit your face, and its silk exterior feels smooth and soft against skin (the padding is made of cotton). Its relative lack of structure makes it more difficult to knock off when you’re tossing and turning. Testers also liked that the Alaska Bear’s unobtrusive buckled strap didn’t snag on long hair the way a Velcro strap could. We think the Alaska Bear is a terrific eye mask for sleeping while traveling or in bed—regardless of your preferred sleep position—but we find the Nidra mask’s roomier eyecups more comfortable.
Lightweight and contoured, this mask fits comfortably and blocks light well for a wide variety of face shapes (though it’s best for those who are sitting upright or sleeping on their back). Its deep eyecups allow your eyes to flutter during sleep.
*At the time of publishing, the price was $14.
A silken exterior material, a flat design, and an adjustable strap make this mask a fit for almost any face, but it puts pressure on the eyes.
For our 2017 review, we researched more than 30 sleep masks from a sea of similar models, spoke to a sleep doctor and a travel expert, conducted a diverse nine-person screening panel, and asked four volunteers to sleep with each of the top contenders for two nights. For our late-2020 update, we researched 45 new masks, tested 10, and asked a panel of six people to sleep with our top contenders for two nights.
I’m a former insomniac and sufferer of migraine headaches, and I find it hard to sleep if there’s even a little light in the room. I’ve always used sleep masks, albeit the ones I’ve pocketed from international flights and fancy hotels (at least, before writing the 2017 version of this guide). As someone who is half-Asian and half-white, I have the slightest hint of a nose bridge but not one big enough to support most molded-nose masks.
If you’re like me and have been sleeping with a mask you got for free, consider upgrading to one of our picks. Airline masks or trendy sleep masks are not as well designed, and you might be surprised at the extra comfort of raised eyecups. After sleeping in our pick, the Nidra Deep Rest, for several nights, I tried on my old EVA Air–branded mask and found it tight, itchy, and not as adjustable. A nicer sleep mask is still an inexpensive purchase, considering the potential it has to improve your quality of rest. “A sleep mask is one of those travel products that you don’t think about until you need it,” said Jillian Rubman of Travel Gift List.
Sleep masks can also help people who have trouble falling asleep at home. “If you find that you’re sleeping enough but you’re tired the next day, a sleep mask is a good way of experimenting,” said Dr. Nitun Verma, a sleep doctor and spokesperson for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. If adding a sleep mask helps you sleep through the night, you can guess that light might be disrupting your sleep. But Verma also advised that sleep remedies that must be worn, including eye masks and earplugs, are not the best solutions for sleep problems at home. Once you’ve pinpointed the cause of your insomnia, modifications to your sleep environment that won’t fall off your body in the middle of the night, such as blackout curtains and a white noise machine, may be more effective. Still, a sleep mask is a much cheaper alternative.
With all of that in mind, we focused primarily on sleep masks that would travel well and can make sleeping on a plane or other vehicle a little more comfortable. But our picks work just as well when you’re on a bed.
We spoke to five sleep experts and spent 35 hours on testing to find the best blackout curtains that look nice and block light for better sleep.
Though all sleep masks can be distilled to one general design—a strip of fabric that covers your eyes—the best masks have subtle tweaks that make them more wearable and effective. A good sleep mask blocks out most light, but a great sleep mask makes you forget you’re wearing it. A sleep mask should also be tiny and easy to pack. Though we tested some masks with pricier frills such as a memory-foam band, we didn’t think those extras were worth the price.
To confirm that our pick would actually work for most people, we also asked several people with a variety of face and nose shapes to wear the masks we liked. Whereas the typical sleep mask has a flat nose cutout that fits just about anyone, some have a molded nose bridge meant to block out all light from the bottom of the mask. These molded designs generally fit people who have a nose bridge—the endpoint of the bony infrastructure of the nose—but they can let in unwanted light on people who have noses that are wider or lacking a bridge.
A good sleep mask blocks out most light, but a great sleep mask makes you forget you’re wearing it.
For people who want a sleep mask that will keep them dreaming even when they’re thousands of feet in the sky, we identified the following criteria to help us decide which masks to test, and then to help us make our picks:
For our 2017 review, after reading through dozens of owner reviews and sorting out the clearly mediocre options and fly-by-night one-off models, we asked a panel of people to try on 11 of the best-rated options priced around $20 on Amazon. After eliminating the masks that didn’t fit well and those that were the least effective at blocking light, we asked our panel to sleep with the remaining masks and rate their comfort and ability to block light and stay on during sleep. We ran all our masks through the wash to make sure they could withstand routine cleaning. I also took the masks on a cross-country flight to judge how they performed on a plane.
For our late-2020 update, we tried on nine new masks, several of which were more expensive than they were during our initial round of testing. We ran all the masks through a washer and dryer. Then we asked a panel of six people to sleep two nights with the three masks we liked the most and to take notes on their comfort, fit, and ability to block light.
Lightweight and contoured, this mask fits comfortably and blocks light well for a wide variety of face shapes (though it’s best for those who are sitting upright or sleeping on their back). Its deep eyecups allow your eyes to flutter during sleep.
*At the time of publishing, the price was $14.
The light-blocking, contoured Nidra Deep Rest Eye Mask is the best sleep mask for travelers and for people who don’t sleep on their stomach. The Nidra rests on your face like a pair of soft goggles, with a shape that bubbles out and never touches your eyelids. Unlike traditional flat sleep masks, this elevated design doesn’t add pressure to your eyelids and provides space for your eyes to flutter and move. Half of our initial testing group picked the Nidra as one of their favorite masks because it was comfortable to wear and blocked light well, and it was a clear favorite of our 2020 test panel, too. Sure, it looks a little like a bra you wear on your face, but the added space makes a big difference in comfort on a long-haul red-eye flight. The Nidra has been our top pick since the first iteration of this guide, and our love for this mask has been unwavering over the past three years.
At first glance, the polyester-covered, elastic-banded Nidra looks like any of the other eyecup masks we tested, but its deeper and wider cups allow it to attain a comfortable and more secure fit on a wider variety of faces. Some other contoured masks create the illusion of eyecups and then cave in against your eyelids when you put on the mask. But the Nidra’s cavernous design leaves ample room for your eyes to move while you sleep no matter how tightly you adjust it. Plus, it won’t smudge makeup.
When we asked Dr. Nitun Verma if there were any potential benefits to the Nidra mask’s convex design, he explained that eye masks shouldn’t interfere with your eyes’ natural movements while you’re sleeping as long as the mask isn’t rubbing on the eyelids. “It’s more of a comfort thing, and an option for those finding conventional eye masks distracting,” he added. So if you’ve tried flat masks before and disliked the pressure they place on your eyelids, the extra space of the Nidra should come as a relief.
The Nidra also features a more gentle and sloping nose-bridge shape than the sharper, angled one on the similar Bedtime Bliss Sleep Mask. This relative lack of structure is helpful because it allows the Nidra to accommodate many more nose shapes, from narrow and arched noses with bridges to wider, flatter noses without bridges. Wirecutter commerce operations coordinator Sany Begum described this mask as “super soft and comfortable,” adding: “It actually surprisingly fit my large nose bridge. Even if it hadn’t, it was soft enough that I wouldn’t have minded the weird positioning.”
The Nidra’s cavernous design leaves ample room for your eyes to move while you sleep.
Spanning temple to temple, the Nidra is the widest contoured mask we tested, so it can accommodate larger faces, though that width still feels comfortable on narrower faces. Extra space around the eyes ensures more room for you to blink even if the mask drifts a little during the night.
It’s also easy to adjust: The elastic bands come together at a wide Velcro strip, which you can adjust to fit your head.
In addition, the Nidra is easy to keep clean. It retained its contoured form and Velcro fuzz after going through a washing machine and dryer, whereas some of the other masks began to fray after just one wash. And if anything does happen, the company’s customer service team is very responsive on Amazon; representatives also answered one of our questions on Facebook within hours.
Many readers have complained about the durability of the Nidra, noting that the exterior fabric can over time peel away and expose the mask’s inner layer of foam. We kept this problem in mind during our late-2020 testing while looking into new masks that could possibly unseat the Nidra, such as the similarly designed Bucky 40 Blinks Sleep Mask. But we were unable to find a more comfortable eyecup mask than the Nidra, or a more durable mask that rivaled the Nidra in all-around comfort. I got my Nidra in 2017. I still sleep with it regularly, and the fabric around my mask has, in fact, begun to peel, as readers have noted about theirs. But I don’t find that this affects the way the mask feels on my face or its ability to block light.
Our testers’ most common short-term complaint about the Nidra concerned its adjustable Velcro strap, which left “an irritating lump” behind testers’ heads and sometimes tangled in long or curly hair. All testers preferred straps that adjusted with a buckle. We can only dream of the idyllic balance between comfort for your eyes and for the back of your head that could be achieved with the Nidra’s shape and a buckled strap (manufacturer of this mask, take note).
Another tester, who has a size 7⅝ “largish melon” for a head—his own words—found that he needed to open the Nidra’s straps all the way to get a comfortable fit. But when stretched to their widest, the straps dug sharply into the tops of his ears. This tester slightly preferred the Bucky, though he noted it was still hard to get a comfortable fit with that mask.
We know that some people just don’t like contoured masks, especially for wearing in bed with their face on a pillow, as the domed design can end up pushed out of place more easily than a flat sleep mask. Among our panelists, two side-sleepers each said the nose bridge stopped fitting against their face once they laid their head on their pillow (I’m a side-sleeper, and the Nidra works well for me). They preferred the Alaska Bear mask for its silky material and more universal fit, and they were willing to put up with some pressure on their eyes. And if you’re a stomach-sleeper, you likely wouldn’t benefit at all from the Nidra’s raised eyecups because half of your face is pressed against your pillow. But for frequent travelers who have to sleep sitting up on a plane, the Nidra is an excellent mask.
A silken exterior material, a flat design, and an adjustable strap make this mask a fit for almost any face, but it puts pressure on the eyes.
If you’ve worn a regular sleep mask before, the silk-lined Alaska Bear Natural Silk Sleep Mask will feel familiar but also a lot more comfortable. Two of our extended-time testers picked this model as their favorite mask, with one going so far as to call it “the gold standard” of sleep masks. The Alaska Bear silk mask also performed better than average in every testing consideration, including fit, adjustability, and comfort. In our tests it was especially good for stomach-sleepers, who found that the convex sleep masks impeded their sleep when their face made contact with their pillow.
Whereas the Nidra’s foam core is covered in inoffensive polyester, both sides of this Alaska Bear design are lined with mulberry silk, which breathes even when pressed against the skin. We think most people would prefer the contact-free sleep experience the Nidra offers, but if you can’t abide that model’s semi-rigid eyecups, soft silk is a close runner-up for comfort.
The Alaska Bear silk mask is also a good choice if convex sleep masks don’t quite fit your face, because its flat design fits nearly universally across all face shapes and nose types. However, for two of our testers, finding a comfortable fit that didn’t pressure their eyes too much meant loosening the straps so much that the mask slipped around and fell off in the middle of the night. Wirecutter staff writer Kaitlyn Wells, who tested the Alaska Bear silk mask in 2020, said that “the mask stays on really well, as long as you tighten the strap every couple of nights,” though she noted too that the mask can slide up and down during sleep. Some of our testers who preferred flat masks complained about how disorienting it felt to wake up and adjust to the light after a mask had pressed against their eyes and lashes for hours.
Testers also liked that the strap adjusted with a small plastic buckle that didn’t bother back-sleepers and rarely got tangled for our testers with longer or curlier hair, though it could slip off. If you sleep with your hair in a bun or a bonnet, slippage likely won’t be an issue.
We also tested two other masks from Alaska Bear. The Alaska Bear 2-Strap Natural Silk Sleep Mask is a flat design like the one we recommend with the addition of a second strap and a flap of silk that can cover your nose. We thought the second strap might take some of the pressure off our eyes, but instead it ultimately made the mask harder to adjust, especially while we were half-asleep in the middle of the night. The nose baffle, meanwhile, did not do much to stop light from leaking in. The Alaska Bear Luxury Sleep Mask is made of plush memory foam with indentations around the eyes, which initially seemed like a good compromise between flat and contoured masks. Our testers found that the mask blocked all visible light and was very comfortable to wear while they were sitting up—but when they slept on their stomach or side, the plush sides of the mask compressed uncomfortably. We didn’t want to recommend a mask that worked well only when a person was sitting up, since our picks are comfortable to wear in almost any position.
The Bedtime Bliss Sleep Mask, another eye-bra, advanced to our final testing. But it was the only mask to fall off everyone’s face during the night, and no one found it particularly comfortable. Although the Bedtime Bliss seems to be the spitting image of the Nidra Deep Rest, its smaller size and sharper nose contour make it less comfortable to wear.
The Bucky 40 Blinks Sleep Mask is almost indistinguishable from the Nidra, save for a slightly stiffer foam build and a wider Velcro strap. The Bucky’s accommodating strap offers a marginally better fit for larger heads than that of the Nidra, though this also means the Bucky’s strap forms a more noticeable bump behind your head. We found the mask’s V-shaped cutout, which is meant to go around the nose, a little stiff and less malleable than the Nidra’s, which is why the Bucky is not our top pick. But if you have a larger head and prefer a mask with eyecups, the Bucky may be a better choice. I’ve had a Bucky mask since our 2017 tests, and the fabric has peeled just as on the Nidra, which suggests that it isn’t any more durable than our top pick.
We tested the Slip Sleep Mask, a fancy-looking mask that arrived in an even fancier case. The mask felt impressively smooth to the touch—the manufacturer, Slip, uses 22-momme silk, which is a bit thicker than Alaska Bear’s 19-momme mulberry. (Momme is a Japanese unit of weight; the heavier the silk fabric, as measured in momme, the higher its quality.) But the mask has a scrunchie-like band instead of adjustable buckles or Velcro, and it felt much too small for my admittedly small head (what is this, a mask for ants?). Our Alaska Bear silk-mask pick also costs a fraction of the price of this mask from Slip or the similarly priced silk mask from Lunya.
The Manta Sleep Mask features two doughnut-shaped eyecups that you can Velcro on and off the strap of the mask, which presumably could help you achieve a better fit. We found the Manta somewhat overengineered: Although the movable eyecups ensure that the mask can fit a wider range of faces, they pressed uncomfortably against the face while our testers were sleeping on their side or stomach. The soft fabric of the mask felt less breathable than the Nidra’s foam or the Alaska Bear’s silk, and the material was uncomfortable in warm weather. If you know you want to wear a sleep mask only when you’re sitting up, and if you have trouble getting traditional sleep masks to fit, this Manta mask might be a good option. Manta recently released several variations of its sleep mask, including a silk mask, a weighted mask, a cool mask, and a slim mask specifically designed for side-sleepers, but all of them have the same doughnut-shaped eyecups that we found uncomfortable while sleeping on our side or stomach.
The makers of the PrettyCare 3D Sleep Mask advertise “large eye cavities” in its Amazon description, but we found that the mask had shallow cups that actually did touch our eyes. (It would be better described as a training eye-bra.) Our initial testers found the mask uncomfortable, and no one picked it as a favorite.
We also tested a weighted sleep mask from the mattress company Purple. We found that the weighted beads did not distribute evenly, which created a distracting sensation while we were trying to fall asleep. The mask is now discontinued.
The opulent, encompassing Sleep Master Sleep Mask caught our attention as one of the more innovative shapes. But its luxurious exterior caused it to trap more heat than any other mask, and several testers were so put off by its blindfold-like appearance that they refused to wear it for more than a few seconds.
Designed for travel, the Trtl Sleep Mask has a fabric flap that you can pull up to “take a peek” without taking the mask off and letting in bright light. It’s a good idea, but the feature feels a little too specific to prioritize in a mask. The entire mask was rather bulky, and I couldn’t get it to stay up on my face (I don’t have much of a nose bridge). The interior is also made of a fleecy fabric that might make sense on an airplane or in a winter cabin but would get uncomfortably hot anywhere else.
Similar to the Trtl, the Tempur-Pedic Sleep Mask had heat and fit issues. A bouffant of velour-like memory foam, the mask felt heavy on my face, and I had to tighten it too much to keep it from slipping. And the fabric made it too hot for comfort.
Nitun Verma, MD, member of and spokesperson for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, phone interview, June 28, 2017
Jillian Rubman, creator of the gift website Travel Gift List, email interview, July 9, 2017
Sleep Mask Reviews & Comparison, Sleep Like The Dead, June 8, 2017
Ethan Green, The Best Sleep Masks I’ve Found For Blocking Out Light, No Sleepless Nights, July 17, 2017
Nancy Shute, For A Good Snooze, Take One Melatonin, Add Eye Mask And Earplugs, NPR, March 19, 2015
Sabrina Imbler is a former staff writer for Wirecutter, where they covered kitchen tools and HVAC.
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