What It’s Like to Make ASMR Videos: Q+A With YouTube Star WhispersRed

“Hello, beautiful,” a British accent whispers through smiling teeth. A woman’s face, tilted to the side and framed by drapes of red hair, fills the entire screen. “Are you ready for bed now?”

These are the first 15 seconds of a video that Emma WhispersRed (real name Emma Smith) has posted to her YouTube channel. It has almost 2.5 million views. It carries on like this for 41 minutes.

WhispersRed has 560,000 YouTube subscribers. Smith is one of the top YouTubers making videos designed to elicit the peculiar and calming autonomous sensory meridian response, or ASMR, from viewers. “Some people call us ASMR-tists,” she tells SELF. “But whatever you want to call me is fine.” Their trade: performing sultry whispers, tapping fingernails, and brushing people’s hair to create a sensory experience that’s often described as “brain tingles,” sought out by those looking for help falling asleep, or as a form of self-care relaxation. The top channels garner millions of subscribers.

For the last five years, Smith has made a living whispering into the ears of online devotees—role playing, tucking them into bed, and scratching gently into the microphone to tickle their jangled nervous systems and lull them into a state of profound ease. “I'm not trying to be a millionaire,” she says. “I'm just on a mission, really. It's just my purpose.”

As of late, she’s been leading the movement into a relatively new trend in ASMR: giving “brain orgasms” in person. She’s collaborating with 15 other ASMR content creators to stage a massive live presentation—an ASMR spa—next year in Berlin. SELF spoke with Smith after a live session she held in New York City with Even headphones to learn about her journey from recording videos in a backyard shed to her curiously intimate experience with Internet stardom.

Emma WhispersRed: I've always experienced the tingly sensation. I had it when I was very little—if I went for a haircut, or if the teacher at school read a story. I didn't know there was a name for it and that other people experienced it, too. Then, in 2010, I had a car accident and developed PTSD afterwards. I was told I was going to lose my leg. I didn't walk for a whole year. But somehow, many operations later, I can walk again.

It was a couple of years down the line that the PTSD kicked in. I was in therapy with my doctors, but it took a long time to get appointments, and in the meantime I was trying to find something that would help me sleep. I was on YouTube looking for relaxation videos, and ended up finding ASMR videos. I didn't know what ASMR meant, but after looking on Google and finding out, I realized it was the name for the feeling I've always experienced. And it was just amazing, because then I realized that not only did other people experience it, but there were people all over the world experiencing it and talking about it.

I was obsessed with getting involved in the community. I started a Facebook group called ASMR UK, and started chatting with people through that. There was a meet-up of people who had ASMR channels, but it was only for content creators. So, that's when I started my channel—because I just wanted to be at the meet-up. I had one subscriber at the time.