Makenna Kelly's bedroom is starkly white.

Its beige walls are dotted with sparse silver accents, but otherwise, everything from the 13-year-old's bedspread to her alarm clock is bright white. When her two portable studio lights are illuminated in the corner, the room almost glows.

Perched in a fuzzy, white butterfly chair a couple of weeks ago, the Fort Collins eighth-grader adjusted the lights and set her iPad on a small table in front of her. She plugged in her microphone, did some quick audio tests, leaned in and hit record.

"Hellooo everybody," Kelly murmured, barely over a whisper, while tapping her acrylic fingernails. "Welcome back-k-k-k-k to Life with Mak-k-k-k-k."

Each sound, from the nail tapping to the clicking k's, was pronounced and intentional — common "triggers" for the millions of people online who experience ASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response.

"It's kind of like the feeling of when my mom used to rub my back or when my friends play with my hair," the petite redhead explained. Only with ASMR, those goosebumps, or "tingles" you once got in person, are now created through a computer screen.

And thanks to the platform YouTube has created for them, users clamor to the site daily for videos from "ASMRtists" like Kelly.

In the videos, people drag toothbrushes across microphones, fiddle with toy slime and do "role plays," where they whisper while pretending to massage your scalp or do your makeup. Fans claim the resulting effects can range from getting the ASMR "tingles" to being lulled to sleep to even having their anxiety calmed.

On her channel, "Life with MaK," Kelly has posted more than 250 videos. In them, she mostly tries foods, from Pop Rocks and ramen noodles to dehydrated tarantula and Gucci stilettos made of fondant icing.

She'll also "unbox" gifts from sponsors like FabFitFun, chat with viewers while painting a canvas or play out different scenarios, pretending to be an esthetician or "sassy flight attendant."

Like ASMR as a whole, interest in Kelly's channel has recently mushroomed, growing from just over 600 subscribers early last year to almost 1.5 million as of April.

Last summer, she became a meme and, as her channel has become more popular, Kelly has been featured in publications such as Wired and BuzzFeed and on shows including "Inside Edition" and "Access Hollywood."

Sponsors will pay around $1,000 to be mentioned in one of her YouTube videos, Kelly said. An Instagram post generally costs them about $500, and fans can contribute directly to a PayPal account linked to in her videos, as well as purchase official "Life with MaK" merchandise.

But Kelly's newfound internet fame has not come without a cost.

As a newer trend, not much is known about the science or psychology behind ASMR. To people outside of its online circles, it can be hard to understand.

Kelly said her own family didn't get it at first. A few kids in her class at Preston Middle School still think the concept is weird. And she often finds herself defending her videos, which have come under fire nationally as concerns swirl about their potential sexualization by some of YouTube's 1.8 billion monthly users.

Despite this, Kelly continues to produce two to three ASMR videos a week, whispering to millions of people online while trying to maintain a normal teenage life, transitioning into high school and eyeing a future — maybe even one without YouTube.

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A new frontier

Once rare, ASMR videos are now a dime a dozen on YouTube. Because of this, Kelly and her mom, Nichole Lacy, try to set hers apart.

As a result, the teen has eaten anything from edible slime to crickets over the past year and a half.

"It's not just tapping on a window, it's, like, eating a Gucci shoe that's made of fondant and that kind of stands out ... that's kind of what I'm known for," Kelly explained.

A coupld of weeks ago, their quest brought them to Bob Ross, the landscape painter made famous by PBS. Or, more specifically, Bob Ross' "paint your tongue" frosting-filled chocolate bars.

After sitting down and recording the intro of her video, Kelly cracked open the packaged candy. Slowly, she ripped the paper wrapping — another favorite "trigger" for ASMR fans — next to her makeshift studio's microphone.

She tapped on and scratched the chocolate, then snapped the bars in half, revealing colorful frosting inside. Kelly sampled the bars, giggling as the frostings dyed her mouth yellow, then green, then black.

"Bob Ross is a good example (of an ASMRtist)," Lacy said, referring to the late painter whose face adorns the chocolate bars' packaging.

Ross, who died in 1995, dominated PBS' programming with his instructional painting show, "The Joy of Painting," from 1983 to 1994. Now referred to as "an accidental pioneer of ASMR," Ross' popularity continued posthumously as his calming painting videos found a second life on the Internet.

"People didn't really have a term for what it was, but they knew when they turned on (his show) and heard brush strokes or someone talking very softly and soothing that, for whatever reason, it relaxes you," Lacy explained.

Talk has slowly swirled around the sensation and experience of ASMR since the mid-2000s, when the idea started popping up on online message boards.

In early 2014, after first hearing about ASMR, Emma Barratt — a cognitive sciences researcher based in the United Kingdom — and Dr. Nick Davis of Manchester Metropolitan University realized there was no peer-reviewed research on it.

In Colorado, neither Colorado State University nor the University of Colorado could turn up any possible experts in the field in their respective psychology or neuroscience departments earlier this month.

But across the pond, the sensory phenomenon intrigued Barratt and Davis. It reminded them of a similar phenomenon called synaesthesia, in which "specific external stimuli cause an internal experience in a second, unstimulated modality."

"It seemed like filling that gap would be a great project for us," Barratt said. In 2015, the two co-authored their first study on the experience of ASMR.

"There are a few theories, but the research is still too young to really nail down exactly what ASMR is yet," Barratt said. "An fMRI study looking at ASMR in response to whisper videos suggested it may be some sort of evolutionary grooming phenomenon. But that study didn't look at why more abstract things might trigger such a response."

"It's still something researchers are trying to figure out," she added.

Barratt said she and Davis were particularly interested in ASMR as a therapeutic tool since, through their research, they learned people watched ASMR videos to improve their bad mood or aid sleep.

"People tell her all the time when they're depressed or they're anxious or they're nervous or having a bad day, it soothes and calms them," Lacy said of Kelly's videos. "If it can have that kind of effect, even on a couple of peers her age, I think it's a positive thing."

Unexpected fame

Kelly started her YouTube channel in November 2017, wheedling her dad into creating an account for her, "of course not expecting it to go big or anything," Kelly said.

After learning about ASMR videos, she immediately asked her mom if she could post them to her channel. Completely unaware of what ASMR was at first, Lacy said she did her research before allowing Kelly, then 12, to start uploading them.

"We didn't expect it," Lacy said of her daughter's sudden internet fame. "A lot of times people ask, 'Well, why do you think she got so popular?' And I think it's a little bit of luck."

Last May, when Kelly's subscribers were still in the hundreds, she posted a video of herself eating raw honeycomb. It went viral, netting nearly 12 million views and hundreds of thousands of new subscribers before YouTube took it down and temporarily disabled Kelly's channel out of fear that her videos could be sexualized or fetishized, Lacy explained.

Since then, YouTube has cracked down as concerns swirled around videos posted by its young users. In February, following reports of an active pedophile network in the comments of its videos, the site disabled the comment sections on tens of millions of its videos, including Kelly's.

"You Google it and there are, like, 2-year-olds, literally 2-year-olds, eating honeycomb on YouTube," Lacy said. "She's kind of like the poster child for minors doing ASMR because she has such a huge following ... they kind of hold her to a different standard."

While Barratt and Davis' research did not tackle concerns over minors filming ASMR videos, their study participants almost universally said ASMR was not a sexual experience, Barratt said.

"It's kind of easy to see how the intimate nature of ASMR videos might be construed by those who don't experience ASMR, but it's important to remember that intimacy doesn't automatically make something sexual," she said.

"There are obviously some issues involving content starring young girls on YouTube and a particular subset of adult viewers that may latch onto that content," Barratt added. "But I think that's more of a platform and societal issue than it is an ASMR issue."

After posting videos for more than a year and a half, Kelly said most people in her life have come around to the concept.

Her mom, who didn't understand ASMR at first, can now be found randomly tapping her fingernails on countertops or playing Kelly's videos at home.

"I'm like, 'Mom! I can hear my voice. Turn it off!' " Kelly said.

"I think I'm, like, boring. I think I'm so cringey," she added. "(But) I feel like every YouTuber is like that. I just don't feel like I'm that amazing. All I do is tap on things."

Still, Kelly said she works hard and has a lot of people who count on her. That's what will make it all the more difficult to quit YouTube one day, which Kelly anticipates gradually doing in about five years.

When asked about her future, ASMR is nowhere in Kelly's answer. She wants to be an actress or model, she said. Depending on the day, her career aspirations can vacillate as much as her teenage crushes, her mother observed. On the list? Dermatologist and teacher.

Whatever she decides to do, Kelly's mother said her YouTube advertising money has allowed the family to set up a savings account and nest egg for Kelly's future plans.

In her room two weeks ago, Kelly had started wrapping up her Bob Ross candy video.

It was a Friday afternoon and school was done for the week. All that stood between Kelly and her weekend was a few more pieces of chocolate.

Well, that and Gwen, the teen's mischievous 1-year-old hairless sphinx cat.

When nobody was paying attention, Gwen silently slipped into Kelly's room, climbed onto her nightstand and reached over to snatch a piece of chocolate.

Seeing her cat scamper off with the candy, Kelly gasped.

"This is what I go through every time!" Kelly said, exasperatingly getting the remaining chocolate bars out of Gwen's reach.

"Mooom, now she's eating chocolate," she yelled out to Lacy, who was sitting in the living room. "She's going to die!"

Gwen, as it turns out, would be a good — if not fearless — food ASMRtist.

"She eats everything," Lacy said, hurrying in to Kelly's room to retrieve the cat.

After settling the sphinx situation, Kelly went back to filming. She shot a few more quick reaction scenes, took a thumbnail photo for the video and shut down her makeshift studio.

Soon, Kelly would edit and upload the video, netting hundreds of thousands of views from her nearly 1.5 million followers — all from her tiny corner of Colorado.

But first, she had to brush the black frosting out of her braces.

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