I Slept In $500 Sheets For A Week… Are They Worth The Splurge?

You don't know luxury until you've slept in $500 sheets — and yes, I know that's a wildly high price to pay for something that merely covers your mattress. After all, good, inexpensive sheets are pretty easy to come by, even for those with the most discerning taste — so $500 for a sheet set does seem more than a little pricey. However, Peacock Alley — the brand that purports to have "established the luxury linen market in the United States" — strongly disagrees. With sheets ranging in price from a hundred dollars to a thousand, these sets come in a variety of thread counts and are made from cotton (some of higher quality than others). But lucky for you, there's a Sleep Week sale going on right now, and you can get 20% off sitewide with no promo code needed. I was sent one of the brand's mid-range sets, the Soprano Sateen Sheet Set, and after sleeping on them for several nights, I can definitively answer the question folks curious about the brand have been asking: are Peacock Alley's sheets really worth it?

The Soprano sateen sheets are made in Portugal from 100% extra-long staple cotton and 420-thread-count sateen sheeting. The set includes a flat sheet, a fitted sheet, and two pillowcases. As soon as I received the sheets, I washed them before trying them on my bed, according to the care instructions: cold wash in the gentle cycle with no fabric softener, and then tumble dry on low. And I'm pretty positive that they were softer before I put them in the wash — red flag. BUT they also didn't pill or give any other visible signs of after-washing distress.

When it comes to sheets, I'm really particular, and I need the place I spend 90% of my time to be perfect. I've found my all-time favorite sheets already — the Ettitude Signature Sateen set — but as a shopping writer, I'm always down for new product discoveries! Since the Ettitude sheets I love and Peacock Alley's Soprano set are both nominally sateen, I was ready to put them to a head-to-head comparison. But as it turns out, the sateen designation doesn't really mean much; the Peacock Aley ones and Ettitude set are made of absolutely different materials — the former cotton and the latter bamboo lyocell, which has a silky-smooth feel and a cooling effect.

Putting the Soprano Sheets on my mattress was a standard-issue process, although the set didn't come with any helpful tags identifying which end was the long or short one — but then again, most of my sheets don't either. Both the flat sheet (which I don't use) and the pillowcases feature a single row of satin stitch embroidery on the hem. It's a nice detail, but not one that's particularly important to me, personally.

The Soprano Sateen sheets look softer than they really are — I'm guessing thanks to the sateen component. If I compared these to my aforementioned favorite sheets, they're not as soft — but compared to regular cotton sheets, they're way softer. They remind me of some really good hotel sheets — soft enough and not itchy (and sometimes, that's all you really need from a set of sheets, anyway). They're not cooling, but they also didn't make me sweat throughout the night. I'd say they're good all-season sheets if you're not an extremely hot sleeper. All in all, if you're looking for a solid set of comfortable sheets — and you have $400 to spend on them — then I highly recommend this Peacock Alley set.