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Style & Sheets - A Man's Guide To Bed Linen - How To Buy The Right Bedding - Vero Linens
Hi! I'm Antonio Centeno, the founder of Real Men Real Style. Today, I'm coming to you from
my bedroom, yes. If my wife found out about this, she'd be very upset. I don't think she'd
ever thought I would film a video from here, but this is important because today, we're
going to be talking about linens.
Yes, bed linens, and I know this is something that, well, guys don't sit around the campfire
talking about, but it's something I think is important in a man's life because we spend
one-third of our lives asleep.
Now, think about that. We spend a lot of time, especially on this channel, talking about
the clothing we wear for 16 hours, 12 hours a day, but what about that other eight hours?
Technically you're wearing sheets and fabrics close to your body and you're sleeping, and
this is a time when we're recovering.
My friend, Ryan Masters over at the Workout Corner, he talks about actually when a man's
getting in shape, an often neglected part of getting in shape is your recovery, your
rest period. And if you're not getting good rest, it's going to affect everything else
in your life.
So today, we're going to be talking about both the style and the functional aspect of
sheets, and why a man should pay attention to this and why perhaps you should look to
pay a little bit more.
I'm going to be highlighting the company called Vero Linens and they came on my radar. The
owner, Steve, reached out to me. We started talking. I really like him. He's a small business
owner just like myself here in the US and he saw a hole in the market. He's like, "Why
can't I cut out the middleman and bring basically thousand-dollar sheets to the market at a
much lower cost?" And many of you guys are instantly thinking, "A thousand dollars for
a pair of sheets? I would never spend that kind of money."
Well, you may not, but your wife may or your girlfriend may because they oftentimes make
the spending decisions in the home realistically and it's something that I want you to understand
perhaps why they're going to spend that money and why, in many cases, it's a great investment
because again, guys, you're spending one-third of your life here. And if you go out and you
buy cheap sheets and I've owned lots of cheap sheets, it really comes down to they fall
apart very quickly. They're never as comfortable.
Well, let me go ahead and start this off with a story because I think it's going to help
explain how comfortable my bed is here and why I look forward actually to crawling into
this bed every night, and it’s not just because I have a beautiful wife, no.
Okay, so as many of you guys know, I took a trip to Ukraine this summer. On the way
back, it was a nightmare trip, 40 plus hours of travel, 17-hour layover in the airport.
At first, I thought it was just a seven-hour layover, then I checked the tickets a couple
of days before, 17 hours. Okay, I misread this. My wife is not happy.
We're just going to stay at -- there's like a Hilton or something right there at the airport.
We come to find out my wife, she's not going to be able to get into Poland without a Visa.
I'm an American. My kids are Americans, but my wife is still Ukrainian. And so for her,
we couldn't get the visa in time, so we're spending the night in the airport, 17 hours.
I went and bought some inflatable mattresses, told my kids we were camping, tried to have
fun with it, but it could've been worse. Let's just say it was something that we arrived
in Chicago and we were tired. We didn’t get a good night's sleep and we wanted -- we
even thought about getting a hotel room or staying with friends right there in Chicago,
but we didn’t because we both know that this is the most comfortable bed in the world
to us.
You know that feeling you get when you go to a hotel, a really nice one, and you crawl
into that bed and you're like, "Wow! Why can't I have this in my home?" Well, the thing is,
guys, you can. You just simply have to pay attention to the details. I'm not really going
to go talking about the bed because that is a large component as well. I'm instead today,
of course, going to talk about the linens and the comforter and all this other stuff
that goes with it.
That's my story basically, a 40-hour trip was made worthwhile or at the end of it, I
felt good at least because we took a shower and I crawled into my bed and it was awesome.
I slept a solid eight to ten hours that night. Well, I did. My poor wife, we've got three
kids and a baby, and let's just say the baby, she likes to wake up multiple times, but I'm
a pretty lucky guy. My wife handled most of that.
The point is, guys, is I look forward to crawling into my bed every night and I want to give
you the skill set, the tools so that when you're looking at sheets or when someone in
your household is looking to spend the money on sheets, you understand both the style and
the functional aspect.
So let's go ahead and start off why this is a good investment, why even care. I already
talked about we spend one-third of our lives asleep, and I talked about how Ryan Masters
and a number of others, anyone that talks about body and nutrition and well-being, how
sleep is incredibly important. But another reason to spend good money on sheets is you
oftentimes get what you pay for.
What do I mean here? Well, higher quality sheets are going to be denser. I can tell
when I got these from Steve and I field-tested these for -- well, over the summer, I had
these on my bed and for the last three weeks, both my wife and I have been field-testing
these sheets and I can tell you that they're great. The first thing my wife said when she
crawled in to bed after that trip is, "Wow! These are really nice sheets." It kind of
made me surprised because here we're both exhausted and she's talking about the sheets,
how nice they are.
They just feel better. It's hard to explain, but it's the difference between a high quality
shirt and a low quality rough shirt. And this is something that again, you want to get into
this bed next to naked, if not naked. It's the density of the weave. It's also the length
of the cotton fibers, which is really important and we'll talk about this a little bit later,
but all of that goes into play. And so, you're sleeping better. Your sheets are going to
last longer and they're going to look better. So after a few washes, lower quality sheets
oftentimes lose their color. In addition, they become rougher.
You can see the spilling. You could look at whenever you dry sheets. Look in the dryer.
If you start to notice, there's a lot of material that you're scooping out. That material doesn’t
come from -- it doesn’t just magically appear. That is coming off of your sheets.
And so, higher quality sheets, you're often going to see almost nothing comes off of them.
I've probably washed these already 10 to 20 times over the last four months. I'll have
to do the math on that, but basically once a week we at least wash our sheets, and I
can tell you that they have stood up. We've got hard water here. I use pretty harsh detergents.
I've got kids. Let's just say you get lots of stains on your sheet when you've got kids
and it's something that you need to be able to wash and expect that everything comes out.
Let me go ahead and quickly talk about as a man, you're going to be looking at, "Antonio,
you've got me convinced. What needs to go on my bed?" Well, if you've got the mattress,
we're not really going to talk about that. You want to have both the sheets. You want
to make sure they come with pillow cases, and then you want to be looking at a comforter.
And to protect the comforter, you want to have a duvet cover. Let me talk about those
three things.
The sheets, I've already spent some time talking about it. You want to have high quality sheets,
both a bed sheet that encompasses the bed. It has usually a little of elastic around
it and it fits and holds the bed. One thing I like about Vero Linens is that they actually
give you a pretty generous cut. A lot of times, companies are going to try to save money and
they're going to actually give you a very tight -- basically, it's going to fit on your
bed, but very, very tightly. Now, that looks good but over time, you're going to lose some
of the -- basically, you're going to have tension on this at all times and it's going
to start to give.
I like it so it fits perfectly on them. Maybe it even has a little bit of excess material
and that ensures that there's not going to be as much tension unless you're laying it
and you're a big guy, but basically, what you're going to see is those sheets are going
to last longer. Again, make sure the upper sheet has plenty of room.
I've got a king size California King here and I can tell you that, again, when you go
with a higher quality, they're going to give you extra material. A lot of low quality manufacturers,
they are going to skimp on that extra material because it just saves them money.
Let's talk about the comforter. I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time here, but on
the comforter, you want to make sure that you've got down, and down is different than
the feathers. There are feathers and then there's down, which are usually on either
the younger animals or the younger birds or right below the actual feathers, and this
is what does a great job of insulating. Many people think they are tiny feathers, but they're
not as hard, and down is usually also going to be more expensive. It needs to have special
care.
Let's say you already have a down comforter and you're wondering, "Hey, I haven't washed
this for a long time," make sure to check out Vero Linens. Steve's got a great blog
and he gives away tons of information on how to clean and how to wash your linens, how
to wash your comforters.
Okay, so moving from the comforters, let's talk about the duvet cover, and this is where
a lot of people -- I know that especially in the United States, they don't buy one of
these, and that basically seals up your down comforter. And so, you can wash your duvet
cover much more often than you wash your down comforter.
I don't really recommend washing your down comforter but perhaps maybe once or twice
a year, and a way you get away with doing that is you never, in a sense, sleep with
your skin against the down comforter. Instead, you've got the duvet cover. Again, this would
be something made from a similar material as the sheets and it simply seals it up and
it protects it from any type of stains. Obviously, we have little bits of oil and dirt on our
body.
Okay, so I've talked about what makes up quality. There are some other things like afghans.
I'll talk about that actually in the article a bit, but finally, I'm going to go ahead
and end this with how to buy quality sheets because you're going to go out there and you're
going to try to make good purchasing decisions.
I know the thing that most men don't want to do, we don't want to go out there and spend
$500 or $400 on what we think are quality pair of sheets or set of sheets and all of
a sudden, find out those linens are low quality because we basically just got ripped off.
So first, let me say the whole idea with thread count is, in many ways, bunk. Basically, it's
being abused in the industry. We see with wool thread counts like Super 180s, Super
220s, there are probably a lot of counterfeit fabrics out there. In addition, it's kind
of like megapixels, and we all see this in cameras. You go to Best Buy and you see this
camera has 22 megapixel, this one has 14. Which one is better? Well, the 22. Well, not
really because it also depends on the size of the sensor.
So think about that with sheets. Think about who's manufacturing, what country it's coming
out of. Usually, Italy, Switzerland, Ireland, they have some of the best linens coming out.
They've been making these for centuries and centuries. China is up and coming, but I stay
away from China most of the time simply because they don't have -- and they're working on
this. I think in the next ten years, we may see a change, but there's less quality control.
Basically, you see a lot of, again, counterfeit fabrics, fabrics that are being marked as
high quality, but they're really low quality.
In addition, almost all of the low quality is coming out of China simply because a lot
of people, they don't think about this. They just buy something based off of cost. I know
I've done this in the past. So look at country of origin. Don't fall into the trap of the
high thread count.
The last thing is pay attention to the quality of the cotton. So anytime you see Egyptian,
anytime you see Super Pima, in addition, whenever it's coming out of places like, again, Italy
or Ireland, this is a great combination because what we're talking about here is the length
of the thread of the cotton.
Cotton, oftentimes the quality is judged by the length of the actual strand. Let's go
back to West Texas. Mostly in West Texas, we're going to see just regular inch to an
inch and a half length, but in the Super Pimas, in the Egyptian cottons, we're going to start
to see those an inch and three quarters up to two inches. And actually, some of the cotton
can be down to three quarters of an inch in length.
Now, why does this matter? Because when they spool up the threads, you're able to get a
stronger weave. Basically, you can get it tighter and stronger and it's going to last
longer and it's going to feel more luxurious because you can get tighter and stronger weaves.
Okay, so I hit on a lot of points here. I know there's a lot more I could've covered.
I cover it in the article quite a bit, but at the bottom of the article, I link you over
to Vero Linens because Steve has a free e-book. When you've made it this far, you probably
care about what I'm talking about here, so go grab Steve's free e-book. It's like 14
pages and it gives you a lot more information there. In addition, his blog is an amazing
resource.
If you're on my email list, I'll even talk more about how Steve has some great offers.
And yeah, if you're on my email list, you're going to be eligible for the giveaway. Actually,
Steve is going to handle most of this if you go download his e-book. I know he's going
to be giving away a set of sheets. I don't know how often he'll do this, but it is something
that you kind of put your name in the hat.
And in any case, if you're in the market, be sure to check out Vero Linens. I'm very
happy and my wife is very happy with the sheets. I'd have to say that I'm sleeping very well.
Okay, guys, if you have any questions, I'd love to see them below in the comments. I
will see you guys in the next video. Bye-bye.