Have You Been Vacuuming Your Mattress? Here's Why You Should

There’s an argument to be made for how often to wash your bed sheets and the internet has definitely taken that argument on. Some people only wash their bed sheets every few weeks or once a month, but bed sheets—along with pillow cases, duvet covers, and other bedding items—need to be cleaned more often.

Anything that comes in direct contact with your skin every night should be washed at least once a week. But what about the bedding and sleep accessories that don’t touch your skin, like blankets and comforters? For those items, think about how often you actually use them and wash them accordingly. That might mean you wash a big load of linens once a month, every other week, or every quarter.

Then comes your actual mattress. Little bits of dust, animal hair, dead skin, dust mites, dust mite excrement, and other small pieces of dirt and grime can get past your sheets and onto your mattress itself. Which begs the question: do you need to vacuum your mattress?

Dave Chen, a creator who typically makes videos about movies and TV, made a video on TikTok asking exactly that question.

“I saw this TikTok where this woman said once a week you should wash your bedsheets and also vacuum the mattress itself,” Chen said in the video. “So I’ve got my Dyson here. You can see it’s empty, and I’m going to vacuum my bed so you can see how much dust goes into the Dyson vacuum cleaner.”

Chen then pans over to using the vacuum on his mattress which looks, truly, completely clean. Then, he shows the vacuum trap with a note over it saying that he vacuumed his mattress just two weeks ago.

There is a whole layer of gunk trapped inside, likely a mixture of that aforementioned dust, animal hair, dead skin, dust mites, and dust mite excrement along with loose fibers and pilling from the mattress itself.

“Alright, finished and this whole layer of dust is just from the mattress and nothing else,” Chen admits.

Dozens of comments on the video are begging Chen to get a mattress protector.

“Coming from someone that works in the bedding industry. GET A MATTRESS PROTECTOR,” one user commented, with more than 36,000 likes.

While mattress protectors definitely help, they won’t do the job for you completely. You should vacuum your mattress at least once a month, with or without protectors or covers, because dust, dander, and dust mites build up in your mattress—which can be particularly unpleasant if you have an allergy.

Just make sure you’re using the upholstery attachment on your vacuum cleaner, because using the same bit that you use to clean your floor will not exactly give you the desired results.

Plenty of folks on TikTok found the whole ordeal to be too much work for them, posting comments like, “I actually just burn my whole house down once a week and build a new one” and, “Bed sheets, yes. But the stuff on my mattress none of my business.”

Read Next: 8 Outdated Bedroom "Rules" Experts Want You to Stop Following

Read the original article on The Spruce.