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Memory foam is the usual culprit when a pillow sleeps hot: it's dense, it hugs your face, and it holds warmth right where you don't want it. If you flip to the cool side a few times a night, the fix is the material, not the thermostat.
Latex and grid pillows breathe and spring back, so they run cooler and keep their loft; a cooling cover and a bamboo case claw back a few more degrees. Here are the pillows that actually sleep cool for side sleepers, from a splurge grid to a budget two-pack.
Lay a hand on the grid and it feels like nothing else, squishy and springy at the same time, with air moving straight through it. That GelFlex grid sits over a Talalay latex core, and the combination is the reason this is the pillow to beat if you sleep hot. It doesn't trap heat the way memory foam does, full stop.
Latex is the quiet overachiever of pillow fills. A single piece of natural Talalay latex gives you steady, buoyant support that doesn't go flat, doesn't trap heat the way foam does, and springs back the instant you move, which keeps a side sleeper's head from slowly sinking out of alignment.
Two adjustable shredded-foam pillows with a cooling cover for the price of one mid-range pillow. Not as cold as the Purple grid, but a lot cheaper, and you can tune the loft.
Two hundred dollars for a pillow sounds absurd until you've spent two years buying cheaper ones that didn't work. The Honeydew is a fully adjustable, made-in-USA pillow filled with a gel-infused shredded foam that stays plush without collapsing, and it's the one on this list that reviewers reach for the word 'cloud' to describe.