A hot kitchen knife sears into a trapezoidal mound of green-glitter-coated gelatin, making hissing sounds as it reveals the cherry-red flesh inside. Silver sequins melt into the slices of jelly. The video lasts five seconds, repeating itself on a never-ending loop. “ITS SO SATISFYING!!! I feel like I’m going to fall asleep,” one viewer comments.
The video described is one of 32 TikTok uploads by the artist @sugar_boogerz, whose bio reads “ASMR, look it up ;)”.
You’ve likely already heard of ASMR — if you didn’t already incorporate it into your bedtime ritual — sometime during the past year when it became the latest misunderstood internet thing, though it’s been around at least since 2014. ASMR videos are often hours long, or at least long enough to lull you to sleep.
Just as it’s doing to comedy and music, however, TikTok is bringing ASMR to exciting new — shorter — forms. And unlike YouTube ASMR, whose only real purpose is background noise, TikTok ASMR contains a strong visual component. In the loosely-held taxonomy of internet sensations, they may more accurately fall under the #oddlysatisfying category. In other words, rather than the soothing bubbly sensation ASMR supposedly delivers to the back of your neck, expect your eyeballs to spin like a hypnotised cartoon character.
Many of the visual ASMR clips capitalise on the strangely cathartic sensation of watching something get blasted to smithereens — boulders crumbling as they roll down a hillside, quarries exploded with dynamite, or dry ramen noodles getting pulverised by industrial machinery. Countless channels devote themselves solely to the video concept of slowly backing a car over grocery items, like cucumbers or tide pods, the camera zoomed in on the tire’s wake of destruction.
One popular creator, @hpc_official, films various materials, like a block of cheese or burning candles, get crushed by a hydraulic press, oozing out of the perforated metal like playdough through a strainer. In one video where they place a cabbage under the press, the cabbage puts up a good fight, straining for a second before (literally) cracking under pressure and then exploding into a blizzard of snowy shreds — just enough of a deviation from the satisfying flow to cause the viewer of moment of inexplicable discomfort. The channel has half a million followers.
Other channels require a bit more tolerance for the absurd — enter “mukbang”, the Korean trend of eating vast quantities of food in front of a camera for the viewer’s audiovisual pleasure. “What a snacc 🤠,” comments one TikTok user on a clip of a woman slurping marinated crab. “What the heck am i watching right now,” comments another, on a video of a man chomping on a very realistic-looking candy hairbrush.
We’ll let you decide for yourself which camp you fall in. Below, I’ve categorised videos according to form of hypnosis. Feast your eyes:
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