Inside the Happiest Corner of the Internet With Instagram’s ASMR Darlings

Even the nominally plugged-in among us will have, by now, come across these videos on Instagram — disembodied hands squishing slimes, carving soap, smashing lipstick, and melting perfectly innocent items with hot knives.

Accounts such as Chloe Park’s @slime.newyork, and Laurel Driskill’s @suger_boogerz, have racked up hundreds of thousands of fans. Their videos are loosely associated with ASMR (or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response), which describes a full-body response to auditory triggers.

“One thing that’s interesting about ASMR, is that it seems that a visual as well as an auditory stimulus mingle together to produce more of a response. That’s likely to be more triggering than either of those things alone,” says Dr. Giulia Poerio, a researcher at the University of Sheffield who specializes in ASMR.

We visited three of Instagram’s popular ASMR accounts to find out what it’s like to be part of the happiest little corner of the internet.