Emma Smith, who goes by the online moniker WhispersRed, has over 200 millions views on YouTube. Photo / YouTube
Emma Smith, Britain's best known 'ASMRtist' reveals how the cult YouTube sensation became bafflingly big business.
Would you like to sleep with Emma Smith tonight? She's going to kill me for saying that, but I mean it quite literally. If you play the '9hr Sleep Clinic' video on her YouTube channel, she'll tuck you in, check you're comfortable, coo softly as you drift off, then wake you up come morning. If that sounds like your idea of a nightmare, it is evidently others' dream, with 1.9m views and counting.
In a chunk of the population, possibly as big as a third, Smith's breathy whispers, audible mouth sounds and nurturing smiles to camera elicit something called an autonomous sensory meridian response, or ASMR – a relaxing tingle that prickles across the scalp and shivers down the spine, which many find helps them relax and nod off.
Smith, 40, only stumbled across the phenomenon herself in 2010, when she ended up in an internet wormhole after a serious car accident left her with PTSD-induced insomnia. Finding videos of nail-tapping and hair-brushing helped her to rest, and then recover, has proved career - as well as life-changing.
Going by the moniker WhispersRed, the mother-of-two is now Britain's best-known 'ASMRtist', with over 800,000 YouTube subscribers and 200 million views of her hypnotically whispering into microphones in her 'Tingle Shed' at the bottom of her south London garden. Business is booming; last month, Penguin released her series of ASMR audiobooks, ahead of publishing her actual book, Unwind Your Mind – the first "entry level" guide to ASMR – in September, when you'll also be able to buy her album of sleepy ASMR songs.
Smith shows me round her sound-proofed shed, stacked with tingle 'triggers' from sequinned fabrics to binaural mics, which capture audio in the same way your real ears hear sound. Eerily, they are also shaped like them: black, silicone, human ears, which she whispers into or runs cotton buds around. Role plays of ear-cleaning are big in the ASMR community. "There are a lot of odd videos," Smith cheerfully admits, "and I've made a lot of them."
"If people don't have ASMR they struggle to believe that it's a genuine thing, so there's quite a lot of scepticism," says psychology researcher, Dr Giulia Poerio of Sheffield University, who has experienced the tingles herself "for as long as I can remember."
Its closest cousin might be frisson: the goosebumps many get from listening to an emotionally charged piece of music. "Neuro-imaging work has shown you're more likely to experience music-induced chills if you've got stronger connections between auditory and emotional sensors in the brain," explains Poerio, who is working on a study to find out how closely this relates to ASMR sensitivity.
"It's important to point out that before YouTube existed, ASMR was still around," she adds. "People experienced it in real life, they just didn't have a term for it." Perhaps it is what Virginia Woolf was describing in her 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway, when Septimus's nursemaid spoke "deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper's, which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sound which, concussing, broke."
Most modern 'experiencers' probably imagined it was a personal quirk until the internet came along. Even then, the sensation was only discussed on its fringes until 2010, when cybersecurity expert Jenn Allen coined the term ASMR, in search of a descriptor "that sounded scientific, so people wouldn't be embarrassed to talk about it."
It caught on. YouTube now hosts over 13 million ASMR videos, ranging from actress Salma Hayak delicately crunching tostadas (1.8 million views) to a three-hour compilation of fabric-scratching that has been watched some 75 million times.
Dr Nick Davis co-authored the first study that established the existence of ASMR, at Swansea University in 2015. He found that whispering is the most common trigger, followed by close personal attention – in real life, that might mean someone gently stroking your hair or face; in the case of popular 'fake facialist' or head massage videos, it means someone simply pretending to.
"The sort of things that tend to trigger ASMR look a lot like grooming, in the way that great apes pick fleas off each other," Davis notes. He wouldn't describe himself as "an ASMR 'consumer'," but he does get the sensation, "mostly from haircuts; there's something about somebody being in your personal space, but in a non-sexual way, that I think is quite relaxing."
Of course, the husky voices and lingering looks to camera of many ASMRtists (mostly women) invite the charge that there's something kinky going on. China went so far as to ban ASMR videos last year, on the grounds that they are "vulgar and pornographic".
"You can sexualise anything," points out Smith, who felt slightly affronted when she was invited on to ITV's This Morning to explain to Phil and Holly how ASMR could aid sleep, last year, only to have her segment introduced with the strapline: 'Whisper porn, have you tried it?'
That many videos are described as 'role play' doesn't do much to dispel the sexual connotations. Until you watch them: I defy anyone to be aroused by being booked in for a dental check-up, or having the safety instructions for a Dremel power tool read aloud.
Poerio's research, the first to measure ASMR's physiological effects, revealed that the heartbeats of those who report experiencing it decreased by an average of 3.14 beats per minute while watching the videos. This is comparable to the effects of relaxation techniques such as mindfulness, and has piqued scientific interest in the health benefits.
"People use ASMR to destress at the end of the day, to have a good sleep, but also to self-treat chronic pain," says Davis. "I don't want to suggest that it is, in itself, a treatment, but if you're maxed out on painkillers, then a distraction like ASMR might be helpful."
What began as an internet curio has now spawned an entire cottage (or should that be shed) industry of ASMRtists, some making serious money. One, ASMRDarling (otherwise known as Taylor Darling), is estimated to earn around $1000 (£800) a day in advertising revenue, thanks to her 2.3m YouTube subscribers. Smith won't talk numbers; suffice to say she was able to give up her day job two years ago to make the videos full-time.
The techniques used by ASMRtists have obvious commercial appeal. In 2017, IKEA released a 25-minute video; all soothing descriptions of the SKUBB storage system and fitted sheets being audibly smoothed. In March, Zoë Kravitz clacked her fingernails down a Michelob beer bottle in ASMR-style in the middle of the Superbowl – the world's most expensive ad break.
There are two ways to interpret this, say Poerio. "The first is that [brands] think that by somehow making people feel relaxed or in an ASMR state, they might be more likely to buy their products. Or it could just be that they've recognised that ASMR is quite trendy in pop culture and they're jumping on the bandwagon." Probably, both.
Smith turns down "99 per cent" of companies, but is happy to work with those who align with her mission to "normalise" the movement, recently making a series of Mind Tingles podcasts for Fuze Tea to introduce it to Daisy Lowe, Clara Amfo and Professor Green.
"I really want it to be recognised as a complementary therapy, a gateway to mindfulness and meditation," she says, listing the problems her fans have told her she has helped them alleviate: "Loneliness, social anxiety, pain – grief is a big one; when you sleep on your own, and you're lonely, just the sound of someone else breathing is comforting."
Now who feels bad for sneering?
Diogo Riedi's grandmother taught him to make bread in a wood-fired oven in Brazil.