San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
A look at the phenomenon of ASMR, the “whispering video trend.”
The viral sensory trend is attracting new creators
Eve Donnelly collected her makeup — mascara, foundation, lipstick, blush and eye shadow — to get cameraready for a new video to upload online. Then, with her Canon G7x on record, she dragged her black mascara brush across her vacant smile, and smacked her lips together as the pigment streaked her mouth in tarry blotches.
The 17yearold then proceeded to devour the rest of her makeup. She guzzled a pouch of goopy liquid foundation and licked the circular palette of her eye shadow with the tip of her tongue. Then she chomped down on the crimson lipstick, chewing on the wax until her teeth turned red. After tapping her long fingernails on a bottle of cheek tint, she threw it back like a chilled shot of vodka.
This unconventional meal was a part of “Eating Makeup ASMR,” the latest post on the Peninsula resident’s virally popular Instagram account devoted to her shockfactor take on ASMR — autonomous sensory meridian response, the internet trend growing in popularity among people who claim to experience “tingly” or staticlike brain sensations triggered by a variety of sounds. Among the most popular triggers are whispering, tapping and chewing.
Over the past decade, a sprawling community of video creators has been whispering softly into highgrade microphones, their cameras supplying ASMR to the masses. There are hundreds of thousands of ASMRinspired videos on YouTube, with subgenres ranging from roleplay to Mukbang, a style of ASMR popularized in Korea in which people loudly eat large quantities of food. ASMR is now being showcased at film festivals and incorporated into new technologies like sleep headphones. This year, Michelob Ultra lager enlisted Zoë Kravitz for its Super Bowl LIII commercial, which featured the “Big Little Lies” actress whispering into a microphone and capturing the sound of pouring beer into a pint glass. The ad marked ASMR’s debut to the mainstream.
Hundreds of contentious viral trends have come and gone online. People risked death by eating Tide Pods or choking down tablespoons of cinnamon; others have jumped out of moving cars to dance to Drake. But these fads were shortlived. The rise of ASMR, which is now in a postmodern stage of rebirth, has been different. Many online video makers, like Eve, have begun to play with the concept through everything from dark performance art to parody to therapeutic healing. ASMR has become a medium through which people not only express themselves but also, often ironically, comment on the trend itself.
Gabby Lang, a.k.a. Gabby La La, is one such creator. Lang, who lives in Oakland with her partner, rapper and filmmaker Boots Riley (“Sorry to Bother You”), and their son, was with a friend, illustrator Sayuri Kimbell, when they were cajoled into watching an ASMR hairbrushing video. In the video, a girl talked to the camera and brushed it as if it were a person’s head. Lang recalled
that it made her feel as if her own head were being brushed. She and Kimbell were mesmerized.
The hairbrushing video couldn’t have been better timed. Lang and Kimbell’s friendship had bonded around creative projects; Lang, a prominent sitar player who got her start by collaborating with Primus’ Les Claypool, had recently invited Kimbell, a craft artist, on tour with Lang’s girl band, Snow Angel, to help sell merchandise. When the tour ended, the two began brainstorming a way to collaborate creatively as a way to spend time together. ASMR, with its puzzling and magical qualities, seemed perfect.
The duo has since filmed almost 20 “Whisper Crafting” videos for their YouTube channel, called ASMR Crafting with Sayuri and Gabby La La. A sampling of their gentle and kooky tutorials includes slime making, “friendship cake” decorating and fruit mandala assembling. The videos feel like what one might experience by taking LSD and strolling through Joann Fabric and Crafts. A recent video, “Candy Sandwich,” was voted the funniest at San Francisco’s cannabisthemed Spliff Film Festival in May and features the pair dressed up as French dessert chefs, constructing a sandwich out of a dry croissant, wafer cookies, gummy worms and globs of Hershey’s chocolate syrup.
Like the late painter Bob Ross, who gained fame for his instructional TV show “The Joy of Painting,” Lang and Kimbell’s whisper crafts captivate not so much because of the art they make but rather because of the way they make it. Ross’ show, which debuted in the late 1980s and has stayed relevant even decades after his death, homed in on the serene manner in which he painted, speaking softly and patting the canvas with his brush. It propelled him to celebrity status and later earned him the title the Father of ASMR.
Kimbell and Lang’s videos are a psychedelic portal into the liminal space between satire and sincerity. Jokes are constant throughout their videos — they poke fun at influencer culture and address, through an artistic sleight of hand, the troubling oversexualization of women and media — but they do it in whispers.
“Even though what we’re doing is a parody of digital media culture, and it’s a parody of ASMR, it’s still actual ASMR,” Lang said. “We’re really into healing and selfcare, so that really appealed to us.”
Kimbell said they once received a message from a commenter who described being in a bad headspace before seeing one of their videos and feeling better after watching it, like everything was going to be OK.
who works in Oakland, thinks gives ASMR staying power. Even more important, Bird said, is ASMR’s potential as a form of transcendence. One ASMR subgenre that interests her in particular is “Oddly Satisfying” videos, which are having their own renaissance online. These videos usually feature a hand playing with an ordinary material — like slime or paint — in a way that’s soothing to the senses. The videos have extrapolated for a global audience the inexplicably pleasing quality of peeling paint off one’s hand or popping stacks of bubble wrap. One of the most popular styles of “Oddly Satisfying” videos features people slicing, dicing and peeling vibrantly colored bars of soap.
For Bird, the simplicity of ASMR in this form serves a higher purpose than just sheer entertainment. It can be a form of microtherapy, she said, in the age of the hypercharged and endless online scroll. In fact, most of the genre’s video titles include phrases like “to soothe your nerves,” or “to induce calm and sleep” or “for stress relief.”
In May, Bird led an ASMR workshop to kick off her exhibit in Oakland, “Oddly Satisfying.” She wanted it to let people of all ages reconnect with their sensory urges. She had attendees describe their sensations as they played with different materials and watched Bird’s videos on loop. As an educator who works with children, Bird admired their lack of inhibition. “I have a big pink furry coat that’s fake fur,” she said. “When I wear it around my students, they don’t have the filter not to pet it.”
Another reason Bird is drawn to ASMR is that, in its purest form, ASMR exists outside of the visual rhetoric of the social media habitat, where posturing and clout oversaturate all content. They’re a fuzzy corner of the web — a brain break — away from the carnival ride of the digital space.
“We have all these images as we scroll through that are bombarding us,” Bird said “When you see a hand petting and playing with something simple, it’s a relief. It’s a little oasis.”
This unmistakable relief was exactly what had drawn Eve Donnelly to ASMR long before she became a YouTube star. In middle school, her nighttime routine was to watch ASMR videos to fall asleep. She only considered getting in front of the camera around six months ago, when she caught on to the ASMR genre of honeycomb eating. After she watched one of the viral videos, she immediately had an urge to eat one herself. “It kind of sounds awful, so I may as well film it,” Eve remembers thinking.
Eve recruited a friend to film her using chopsticks to munch on the honeycomb and decided to post it to Instagram as a joke. Eve also direct messaged it to a prominent Mukbang account, which reposted it to its 100,000 followers. Almost at once her own account started buzzing with attention. It inspired her to make more videos on a consistent basis, and now she averages one or two a week. All her videos use the elements of ASMR — a highquality microphone, auditory triggers and personal contact with the camera — but turn it on its head to subvert its form.
Her portfolio includes Eve eating money (both cash and coins), brushing her teeth with ketchup, munching on a rose, eating deodorant, chewing on raw meat and more.
In an especially macabre video, Eve crunches on what appears to be glass until her mouth fills with blood.
The shockASMR business isn’t the easiest one to be in. Eve’s direct messages are brimming with hate mail and death threats. One user recently posted: “Are you reallly (sic) eating money when there are millions of people without homes?!” Another pleaded, “For your own health please stop your going to regret this when you’re older so please just stop.”
Her social media comments sections have become their own unique brand of message board, where her followers debate about everything from salmonella to the ethics of her craft. One questioned: “Girl is u human?” The only ones she takes personally, she said, are those that imply her authentic videos are fake.
Censorship has been an issue, too. Her videos are frequently removed from online platforms. Just last month, Eve’s Instagram account (whose handle is too profane to print in The Chronicle) was deactivated for violating community guidelines. But her numbers keep climbing. The fashion retailer Forever 21, which has partnered with Cheetos, the crunchy cheese snack, recently sponsored one of her videos and sent her a shirt from their Flamin’ Hot Cheetos x Forever 21 collection.
“I haven’t seen anyone else do anything similar,” Eve said. “I just will do anything. Call it stupid, call it brave. My sister would always tell me, ‘Eve, there’s something wrong with you. You have no shame.’ ”
Her mother, Edita Donnelly, is supportive of Eve’s performances but said she and Eve consult advice from experts before some of her satirical stunts. The two of them asked Eve’s uncle, an organic chemist, for guidance before she recorded herself drinking liquid out of a bleach bottle. They went to a local butcher before Eve ate raw meat, too.
“Occasionally I’ll see something that I don’t like, and we’ll have a discussion about it,” Edita Donnelly said. “To me, this is an artist creating work, with various materials. You could call it mixed media.”