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This Japanese Gold-Leaf How-To Is ASMR for Your Eyes

You will never be this good at anything.
Image: Screenshot/YouTube

"How do they make gold leaf?" is probably a thing I've only ever asked myself once in life. But I sure am glad that Japanese YouTube channel "Science Channel" decided to create this instructional guide for making gold leaf that's set to what's possibly the most adorable music in the world.

Sure, you'll learn a bunch of useful trivia such as: gold is the most ductile and malleable of metals, and "gold of a mass of 5-yen coin can be thinned to 0.0001 millimeters are stretched over the area of a tatami mat." But the real reason you'll probably end up enjoying this video as much as I did is because it's basically ASMR for the eyes.

There's something deeply satisfying about watching people who are experts in their craft complete tasks with skill and precision. From the guy who creates gold alloys by melting materials at 1,300 degrees Celsius, to the man who feeds said alloys into powerful stretching machines, to the woman who makes sure every paper-thin sheet of gold leaf is just so, this entire video is a wonderful testament to people who still work with their hands to create materials and objects we probably take for granted.

Japan has been refining the craft of gold leaf production for a long time, and has been credited with being able to produce the thinnest gold leaf in the world. By implementing X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy techniques on 16th and 17th century Japanese paper screens, researchers from the Atomic Physics Center of the University of Lisbon in Portugal even discovered that Japanese gold leaf artists worked on a nanoscale.

Gold leaf produced in the Japanese prefecture Kanazawa is particularly renowned for its quality and is used by many artists in textiles and ceramics. Approximately 98 percent of Japanese gold leaf is manufactured in Kanazawa.

So sit back, enjoy this how-to guide, and give a little bit of credit to the people out there who know how to do something much, much better than you ever will.