With this lipstick-sized bottle, you’ll never have to toss and turn again. Photo by Sprayable.
I get a perfect night’s sleep every night and always wake up refreshed…said no one ever.
But don’t toss and turn: a spritz from a lipstick-sized spray bottle might be able to fix your sleepless nights. Currently featured on IndieGoGo, Sprayable Sleep is a simple solution for anyone who suffers from insomnia, jetlag, snoring partners, or even a severe attachment to their smartphone. According to Sprayable, it just takes a spritz or two of Sprayable Sleep an hour before bed and the user sleeps like a baby.
Sprayable Sleep has only three ingredients, all of which already naturally occur in the body: water, melatonin (the hormone that tells your body to be sleepy when it’s dark), and tyrosine (an essential amino acid).
But what’s so great about Sprayable compared to sleeping pills? Because the liver ends up absorbing about 90% of the melatonin in the pills, sleeping pills flood your body with much more melatonin than it needs to fall asleep. Sprayable’s dose is transmitted directly through the bloodstream, so it contains only about .03mg of melatonin (30 times less than sleeping pills). This method of delivery also allows users to control their dosage based on their body’s tolerance to melatonin.
Because Sprayable is transmitted through the skin gradually, none of the dosage is wasted as it is with melatonin pills, so the body only receives as much melatonin as it needs. Photo by Sprayable.
Not that they should need to. Because the dosage is sprayed rather than ingested, Sprayable’s model delivers the melatonin to your body over time, mimicking how the body gradually produces melatonin rather than drowning the body with meltonin. This way, the user experiences a natural drowsiness that comes on naturally and is delivered evenly throughout the night, ensuring that the user wakes up refreshed after a normal night of sleep rather than feeling like they barely survived a zombie apocalypse.
So far, the product has received a huge wave of support, blowing through 700% of its $15,000 goal just in the first week of its campaign. A bottle of Sprayable Sleep, which contains a month’s supply, is offered as a reward for backers of its campaign at $15 apiece (which will eventually be its retail price). If you’re urgently in need of some sleep, the company is offering prototype models, guaranteed to ship the day the campaign ends, to backers that pay $85.
Though this might seem like a rather hefty price, there is a huge demand for a sustainable sleep aid product that doesn’t cause the adverse effects that sleeping pills do. And you might be surprised by the amount of people who have difficulty getting enough shut-eye—the market for sleep aids has grown exponentially in recent years, reaching nearly $55 billion in 2013. It seems as though the stressful commotion of modern life and the constant use of screens have ruined most people’s body clocks, ensuring that the business of sleep isn’t going anywhere.
This is the team’s second successful Sprayable solution; in Summer 2013, they launched an IndieGoGo campaign for Sprayable Energy, a sprayable pick-me-up, and have since sold tens of thousands of bottles to 50+ countries. Based in Palo Alto, CA, and incubated at Stanford University, Sprayable was co-founded by Ben Yu (a Harvard dropout and recipient of an inaugural Thiel Fellowship grant) and Deven Soni (former venture capital investor). The pair was guided by Yu’s father, Chongxi Yu, PhD, a transdermal medicine expert with over 20 years of research and development experience in the field.
For those obnoxious 12-hour flights with a wailing baby in front of you, Sprayable Sleep is, hands-down, the perfect solution. But for individuals with snoring partners, insomnia, or smartphone separation anxiety (me), a lifestyle change might be safer, simpler, and more appropriate. Do you think Sprayable has struck gold?
by Rafah Ali
