Student covers uni fees by selling videos of herself sneezing to fetishists for up to £100

Reported on the daily mirror online

Going to university is an expensive venture, with the average student in England now believed to graduate with debts of over £50,000.

Abi Haywood, however, has a novel way of countering the mounting costs which further education incurs.

The fine arts student, from Wales, has identified a niche money-spinner – filming herself sneezing and charging sneeze fetishists for the footage.

Abi can make £20 to £30 per clip, and will even charge up to £100 for more specific video requests. This might be, for example, when someone wants her to include footage of her feet or to carry out a request somewhere public.

She told MailOnline that she began this enterprise to help pay for her studies as she needed a “safety net”.

As for the sort of requests she gets, she revealed: “I had a request where this guy wanted me to sneeze and go to the toilet in a public bathroom because of the privacy, echo and the clinicalness where people would be unaware.”

After carrying out the instruction at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, she got a £100 Urban Outfitters voucher for her efforts.

“Ideally [the buyer] would send me money over PayPal but because he was a first time buyer and didn’t want his bank information showing or maybe he has a wife and he doesn’t want her seeing or buying material from fetish models,” she explained.

Abi’s motivation behind choosing the Institute for her filming came about as she “knew they would hate the concept.”

She added that she often found the art world to be elitist and inaccessible to people from low income backgrounds.

Among her fans is one man who told her he watches [her] on [his] 72-inch TV in surround sound.

With some help from a clothing tag and her allergy to bright lights, Abi can rack up 11 sneezes in one go, ad points out she’s only ever had two nosebleeds.

Abi got started on creating videos for fetishists after creating a piece called “drawing of the form, endurance and repetition”. For this, she had sneezed 37 times in three hours and had drawn an outline in pen.

Having filmed her work and uploaded it to YouTube, the number of views quickly mounted to the thousands and the requests started to come in. She realised there was money to be made from these sort of clips.

She admitted she would have dropped out of Leeds art school without the cash because her waitressing job at the Hepworth Gallery pays minimum wage.