Known for his combination of body massage, personal grooming and skincare, his videos have racked up over million views. Microphones strapped to his forearms capture the activity, each recorded sound clear as a bell: the slow lathering of foam, fingers scrubbing the scalp, the meditative trickle of water. When those videos went viral, tax inspectors visited him looking to recoup the money he had supposedly earned. So, I did hours of additional massage training and started making my own.
Watching someone get a massage is relaxing. Plus, the barbers are good at staying on top of the pressure for content creators to constantly innovate. The barbershop is a space where men can be close. And as viewers, we participate in the intimacy on display in the videos. We hear the cotton pads sweeping across a forehead, water sprayed into dry hair, oil squelching on skin. And by watching the same barbers on repeat, we might begin to feel like we know them intimately too.
It can also be kind of sexual. Granted, the titles of their videos are quite bland for the most part , but their content is anything but. The clients are young, good-looking and muscular. They are topless or stripped to their underwear, submissive on a massage table and shot with a tightly focused lens.
The barbers are handsome too, and up the sexiness by squirting their clients with various oils and creams. This is soft porn as ASMR. Or vice versa. Or both at the same time. Secondly, the guys featured in those videos are quite attractive. Nearly everybody reached out to discuss their reasons for watching the videos refused to talk, mirroring the reluctance of the barbers to admit their motivations out in the open. What is their motivation? The top earners can make hundreds of thousands β if not millions β of pounds a year from their videos.
And the captive audience with very healthy imaginations are more than happy to keep watching, if the ecstatic comments beneath the videos are anything to go by. Dazed media sites. Beauty Beauty Feature.
