diff --git a/components/style/atomic_refcell.rs b/components/style/atomic_refcell.rs
new file mode 100644
index 00000000000..a45a682b638
--- /dev/null
+++ b/components/style/atomic_refcell.rs
@@ -0,0 +1,41 @@
+/* This Source Code Form is subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public
+ * License, v. 2.0. If a copy of the MPL was not distributed with this
+ * file, You can obtain one at http://mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/. */
+
+use parking_lot::{RwLock, RwLockReadGuard, RwLockWriteGuard};
+
+/// Container type providing RefCell-like semantics for objects shared across
+/// threads.
+///
+/// RwLock is traditionally considered to be the |Sync| analogue of RefCell.
+/// However, for consumers that can guarantee that they will never mutably
+/// borrow the contents concurrently with immutable borrows, an RwLock feels
+/// like overkill.
+///
+/// The RwLock in the standard library is indeed heavyweight, since it heap-
+/// allocates an OS-specific primitive and delegates operations to it. However,
+/// parking_lot provides a pure-rust implementation of the standard
+/// synchronization primitives, with uncontended borrows compiling down to a
+/// single atomic operation. This is exactly how we would build an atomic
+/// RefCell, so we newtype it with some API sugar.
+pub struct AtomicRefCell<T>(RwLock<T>);
+
+pub type AtomicRef<'a, T> = RwLockReadGuard<'a, T>;
+pub type AtomicRefMut<'a, T> = RwLockWriteGuard<'a, T>;
+impl<T> AtomicRefCell<T> {
+    pub fn new(value: T) -> Self {
+        AtomicRefCell(RwLock::new(value))
+    }
+    pub fn borrow(&self) -> AtomicRef<T> {
+        self.0.try_read().unwrap()
+    }
+    pub fn borrow_mut(&self) -> AtomicRefMut<T> {
+        self.0.try_write().unwrap()
+    }
+}
+
+impl<T: Default> Default for AtomicRefCell<T> {
+    fn default() -> Self {
+        Self::new(T::default())
+    }
+}
diff --git a/components/style/lib.rs b/components/style/lib.rs
index 138c8a04cb9..51ee0e122e5 100644
--- a/components/style/lib.rs
+++ b/components/style/lib.rs
@@ -81,6 +81,7 @@ extern crate util;
 #[macro_use] pub mod string_cache;
 
 pub mod animation;
+pub mod atomic_refcell;
 pub mod attr;
 pub mod bezier;
 pub mod cache;