Therm-a-Rest Air Head Lite camping pillow review: inflatable head rests don’t come much better

Therm-a-Rest Air Head Lite: first impressions

This “Air Head” is no dummy. The Therm-a-Rest Air Head Lite makes the answer to the question should I take a pillow with me camping? a complete no brainer: yes, you should – so long as it’s this one. It’s quickly proven itself to be one of the best camping pillows on the market.

Therm-a-Rest are a brand best known for establishing a very high bar with their game-changing and still category-leading sleeping pads. Now they’ve launched this preposterously packable BYO-puff pillow, which weighs next to nothing and takes up far less room in your pack than a pair of socks, a packet of chips or a deck of playing cards.

Once inflated, though, this pillow – made with lightweight but robust stretch knit fabric – offers 4in / 10cm of cushioning to rest your tired head on. The top material is soft to the touch and comfortable next to your face when you’re lying on it, for both back and side sleepers.

Easy to inflate and deflate, thanks to its excellent valve, the Therm-a-Rest Air Head Lite comes with a tiny stuff sack that the pillow can be tidily stowed away in before it goes in your pack, or back into your gear locker at home during the off season.

Therm-a-Rest Air Head Lite: in the field

I’ve been using the Therm-a-Rest Air Head Lite for a range of overnight outdoor escapades for the last few months, and I can confidently say that if you’ve ever wondered whether it’s really worth taking a pillow along on a multi-day adventure – when you’re hiking, biking, paddling or even running, rather than using a vehicle – then this pillow makes all the arguments against doing so completely redundant. 

Obviously, it is during backpacking, bikepacking and fastpacking forays that this lightweight headrest really comes into its own: simply pop it in your backpack and forget about it until bedtime, when you can then produce a proper pillow and treat yourself to a genuinely decent night’s sleep – a massively valuable luxury when you’ve spent a big day on the trails and have another to come when you wake up in the morning.

But the Air Head is so comfortable that I’ve found myself making use of it on occasions when I could have easily grabbed a “normal” pillow from home, such as garden campouts and festival and car camping scenarios when there were no space or weight restraints.

The pillow fits inside the hood of virtually all good sleeping bags, which means it stays in place, where you need it, and it works well regardless of whether you’re propping yourself up and reading with a headlamp, or laying on your side and going straight to sleep.

But what really makes this pillow far superior to most of its fellow inflatables is the valve. It’s similar to those found on sleeping mats, and makes it very easy to both blow the product up and – more importantly – quickly and easily expel all the air in the morning, so you can stash it back in your pack and hit the trails.

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