I’ve spent the last two weeks staring at a man’s hands. I know them well, those clean-trimmed nails and stout phalanges. You would too if you spent as much time as I have been watching videos of those hands rubbing, stroking, and polishing. No, I’m not talking about porn, but the latest trend in YouTube’s ever-morphing zeitgeist: the restoration video.
These mechanical resurrections started popping up on YouTube a few years ago with vintage car and toy restorations. Now racking up millions of views, restoration videos involve the painstaking efforts to restore furniture, metalwork, or even artwork back to its original state. The objects are often decrepit and falling apart, not long for this world. And yet, the restorers — with their arcane knowledge and technical skills — can do it. Every step is filmed and edited into a neat package, with a before and after slideshow wrapping it all up like a bow on top of the gift to the world that it is.
And they’re utterly mesmerizing.
