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 four 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.
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.
The Nidra Deep Rest Eye Mask has been our top pick for more than four 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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
The Best Sleep Masks Of 2023
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.
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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 four 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
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.
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.
The Best Sleep Masks Of 2023
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.
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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 four 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
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