While he can’t turn water into wine, Nigel Braun is making vodka out of thin air.
He is neither miracle worker nor magician. His secret is chemistry, and he films his experiments inside a commercial-grade laboratory in Montreal and shares the videos on his YouTube channel. That’s where 6.5 million subscribers know him as NileRed, like the fluorescent chemical dye, a name he acknowledges sounds vaguely biblical.
Mr. Braun’s videos surged in popularity during the pandemic, reaching 2.5 billion views, and as his audience ballooned, so did his ambitions. His experiments — often whimsical, sometimes practical and occasionally dangerous — range from transforming paint thinner into cherry cola, to developing bulletproof wood, to making carcinogens from scratch.
Over the past decade, since dropping out of grad school, Mr. Braun, 32, has outgrown a hobby workshop in his parents’ garage and two other facilities, settling into a third lab large enough to rival some academic research spaces in Canada.
But Mr. Braun considers himself less a chemist or a science communicator in the vein of Bill Nye and MythBusters than an adventurer. “I want to have a journey,” he said. “I’m not interested in just conveying information.”
Part of his appeal is that he doesn’t care to make chemistry look easy or neat.
Some of the tasks he sets himself on are both epic and arduous, like his many attempts to make purple gold, an alloy of gold and aluminum that gives the metal a unique color, but whose recipe is only vaguely described in one line of ingredients in a patent.