Why watch a soap opera when you can watch soap?
After the horrors of 2020, slide into the new year with a smile.
This 10-minute video of a woman’s hands crushing, cutting and crumbling pieces of soap is perhaps a fitting way to bid good riddance to 2020. Think of the soap as everything you hated about last year, and usher in 2021 with the visceral satisfaction of watching it get beautifully destroyed.
There are hundreds of such soap videos online, a sub-genre of mesmerising “ASMR” videos that amass millions of views. ASMR refers to autonomous sensory meridian response – a scientific term for the pleasant tingling you feel in your body in response to certain visual and auditory triggers.
Like the sight and sound of soap balls and soap roses getting crushed to bits in a silent room. Or this satisfying crunch of colourful, compact sand being minced and sliced to perfection. Or even this video of the “Amazing triple spiral” – a complex domino structure that falls with an organised elegance. For an obsessive-compulsive organiser like me, the sight of a colour-coded bookshelf is gratifying enough!