Brooklinen’s Heathered Cashmere sheets are the luxurious investment no one needs, but everyone wants – and they’re 15% off right now

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• Brooklinen's Heathered Cashmere sheets and duvets are expensive, but a few hundred dollars may be a small price to slumber under the soft, luscious influence of cashmere.
• The 5% cashmere/95% cotton blend means it's durable but still inexplicably soft.
• I've tested these sheets for more than a year, and if you've got the dough, I'd recommend them for anyone who's looking to invest in their sleep.
• Brooklinen is running a 15% off sale right now with some exclusions – luckily, the cashmere sheets are not one of them.
• Sign up for Insider Reviews' weekly newsletter for more buying advice and great deals.

If millennials have learned how to enjoy any of life's finer pleasures better than their parents, sleep is surely one of them. You don't have to look too far, or even open your eyes, to take note that dozens of direct-to-consumer startups have usurped the thrones of the bedding and sleepwear brands of yore.

Around the head of the pack is Brooklinen. If you've ridden public transportation, listened to commercial radio, or you've spent even a nominal amount of time on this website, you have surely heard of the brand, if not purchased something from it, and with good reasons. Old adages are painful to both read and write, so I'll spell you the clichés and just nod to them: We don't spend an insignificant amount of time in our beds, and if you're sleeping on paper-thin, synthetic-rich sheets, it's time to get with it.

No, we don't all have $500 to spend on bedsheets. For most of us, that's crazy talk. But let's admit it, we've all been guilty of spending plenty of money on plenty of novelty and useless things.

Regardless of what we do with our money, our beds are our temples, our high-holy places of rejuvenation, where we repent for revelrous late nights and weak moments at the bodega; bad influences and bad choices. Sin boldly, but believe even more boldly in the power of sleep. Try as we might, we cannot go without sleep, and good sleep, at that.

Which brings us to cashmere. Oh, cashmere. Luscious, plush, pulchritudinous, cashmere. Is there anything more decadently divine? A cashmere sweater has long been the zenith of the finest wool ever made, but now it can be found in bedding.

Review of Brooklinen's cashmere sheets

I put these sheets through their paces for a whole year before writing this review. I had to give these things a dose of good old unadulterated life. Spills, less-than-considerate wash cycles, merciless washing machines, and downright menacingly negligent spin-dry cycles. You know, all the day-in, day-out use we tend to overlook or downplay. They look great in the advertisements and fresh out of the packaging, but, as truth has it, real life is not easy for bedsheets, and they do not go gentle into that good night.

Suffice it to say that I didn't give these sheets special treatment. They probably stayed on my bed for too long, I probably washed them too many times in my unforgiving washing machine and drier (a budget brand with an overly-compensated-for inferiority complex), and they were rarely folded and probably put away ever-so-slightly damp more than once.

Still, despite a little pilling, they've held up, which is far more than I could say for a cashmere sweater, were it to receive that treatment.

And, my goodness, are they still soft. While my apartment somehow bounces between climates (think a damp day in the Scottish Highlands to the dead of summer in the Atacama Desert), I've neither quite overheated nor frozen in them, and the duvet is a bona fide gilding of the lily, it works wonders when my bedroom becomes more reminiscent of Scotland.

Specs

Made with 95% cotton and 5% Himalayan cashmere, Brooklinen's Heathered Cashmere comes in a full "Hardcore" set, which includes a fitted and a top sheet as well as four pillowcases and a duvet cover for a little under $500. You can also buy the "Core" set which includes a sheet set, two pillowcases, and duvet cover for under $300.

And while 5% cashmere sure doesn't seem like a lot, it makes all the difference between the sheets. It might not give you that spider-silk-soft, weightless, in-the-clouds sensation that a pure cashmere scarf does, but face it: That would never last in bedsheet form.

The sheets come in all sizes from Full to California King, and while the brand doesn't offer "deep" sheets meant to fit some newer bed-in-a-box mattresses, they fit well enough over my 14-inch mattress and I don't have a problem with them sliding off the corners.

How to care for Brooklinen's Heathered Cashmere sheets

Here are my unsolicited two cents, which probably already go without saying: Do as I say, not as I do.

I more or less tried to destroy these sheets, but while I didn't exactly achieve that, I definitely tried my best and caused them to pill a bit.

That's because heathered cashmere, which is just a fancy way of saying interwoven with another color or fabric (in this case, that's the 95% cotton) is a little on the delicate side. It's brushed in the way that finer flannel is brushed, which makes it fuzzy and absolutely rhapsodic to the skin, but brings along the tradeoff that it's even more prone to pilling. Again, follow the care instructions.

Brooklinen's care instructions for these sheets read as follows: "Machine wash cold separately, do not use bleach, tumble dry low and remove promptly to deter pilling, iron on low."

The bottom line

So is it out with plain-Jane cotton and percale, and out with jersey and sateen? Well, unless you've got more money than Forrest Gump, that's a credit card bill you will eventually have to answer for. But during the colder months – those dreary, maybe no longer frigid (because what is winter anymore) but still marrow-chilling months – we say treat yourself, dear reader.

No, these are not the last sheets you'll ever buy. No, you probably won't want them come spring or summer (for that, you'll want linen sheets). No, you most certainly will not be serving breakfast in bed in these sheets unless you are a beyond decadent human that delights in destroying the finest linens available to mankind (if so, more power to you).

But having one set of almost impossibly soft sheets and duvet cover should not be out of the question for everyone. I've spent the better part of two winters in mine, and while I've changed out the sheets, the duvet cover remains the same from October through April.

There's just something about cashmere, when and where applicable and affordable, that one cannot pass up. Scoff all you like, but it's one of those things that helps me hibernate through winter all the more complacently. And if the whole bundle is too much, consider just the duvet cover to start.

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