The Puffery of Pillows

“Fill power” – the very term reeks of dubious commercial enterprise. It is a metric concocted, one suspects, by those peddlers of feathered luxury who prey upon the vanity of the overstuffed. It purports to measure the “quality” of down, as if discerning the relative merits of goose plumage were a task demanding scientific rigor.

What these mountebanks of the boudoir are really selling is air – or rather, the promise of air. They seek to quantify the loft, the fluffiness, the ability of a given ounce of down to puff itself up like a banker after a killing in Wall Street.

A high fill power, they assure us, translates to greater warmth without the burden of weight. It is the holy grail of the cold-blooded and the indolent, a way to achieve maximum thermal insulation while minimizing the effort required to drag the covers up to one’s chin.

The discerning consumer, of course, will regard such claims with a healthy dose of skepticism. A blanket, after all, is but a simple thing – its purpose to provide a modicum of warmth and perhaps a touch of aesthetic comfort to the weary soul. Whether it achieves this through the inflated egos of geese or the honest toil of sheep is a matter of negligible import.

And yet, if one must indulge in this charade of fill power, let us at least establish a benchmark for the gullible. A rating of 700, we are told, is where respectable puffery begins. Anything less, and one might as well be cuddling a burlap sack stuffed with old newspapers.