ASMR Marketing Is Officially Dead After This Soothing 4-Minute Clip About Shaving Your Balls

Such lines, whispered ASMR-style by a nerdy dude in a shower, punctuate 72andSunny Amsterdam’s surprisingly entertaining and even vaguely safe-for-work “Shavetorials” for Lynx Shower & Shave Foam.

Also on tap: scratching, brushing and razor blades caressing soapy skin. These sights and sounds permeate a trio of tongue-in-cheek instructional videos for the U.K. market on how men should shave their legs, chests and, yes, scrotums.

Each 4-minute YouTube spot—trimmed, as it were, to 10 seconds on Snapchat—seems to lampoon the ASMR craze while embracing its soothing sensory stylings. And nods to Gillette-inspired non-toxic masculinity bubble up as Lynx poses the question, “Why can’t guys shave whatever they want?”

At times, it’s a slippery mixture that doesn’t quite wash. Still, the clips contain some amusing bits, for those who can hang in for the duration.

First up, our sudsy anti-stud ventures below the waist, but it’s probably still clean enough for workplace viewing, thanks to some well-placed pixelation (and, really, you won’t want a clear view):

That was nuts in more ways than one, right? Coco-nuts! Still, it’s more woke, certainly, than BBH’s handling of similar ballsy material for Axe (as Lynx is known in the U.S.) from a decade ago.

“Our audience is teenage guys who are trying to find their way to being men,” Gregg Clampffer, creative director at 72andSunny Amsterdam, tells Adweek. “When it comes to masculinity, we’d rather give guys a laugh than a lecture. Which is not to say there is not a message. We are trying to positively portray a confident, somewhat normal guy who who is willing to share tips on shaving different parts of his body. Not because he has a great body, but because he thinks other normal guys might enjoy the pleasure of a nice shaving foam and the body smoothness that comes with it.”

Next, our hirsute hero thins out his chest hair with the gusto of an explorer hacking through dense jungle vines:

The campaign’s inspiration? “We’d shared the weirdness of ASMR videos with one another because we found them fascinating” and decided such an approach provided “a really surprising solution to the Lynx brief,” Clampffer says. “Taking the microphones into the shower seemed like a logical, sensorial experience that made us laugh.”

“We didn’t set out to make a spoof of ASMR,” he says. “We wanted to add to the genre with something that might result in people looking and listening to showers and shaving in a different way.”

In this final clip, we learn that actor Matthew Alexander Kaufman — who’d done ASMR videos in the past — has legs, and he knows how to shave them:

You’ll need hours of ASMR to scrub the images of his pink, pruney parts from your mind.

“We shot all the episodes within a day, so we had to time everything quite well,” Clampffer recalls. “We shot all the upper body first, and then realized when you shave someone, there’s no more hair. Luckily enough, our amazing hair and make-up artist saved all of Matthew’s hair and then glued it back onto his chest. Gross. But funny to see.”