Whether you want to know what’s behind non-standard chemical reactions or if you just want to see something spectacular, YouTube channel NileRed has interesting videos for everyone.

Against popular theories posed by NileRed’s subscribers, ‘Nile Red’ is not actually the name of the popular channel’s creator. Nigel Braun (pron. ‘brawn’) is the man behind the myth. The young Canadian chemist has been making videos since his early teens, but uploaded his very first YouTube video in March of 2014. Braun: ‘At the time, I was working in a lab and I started filming my projects. I had to put the videos somewhere, so I decided to create a YouTube channel to store my videos.’

However, before you can upload anything, you have to fill in a channel name. ‘I didn’t want something that was too obviously related to chemistry. A colleague at university flipped through a book with chemical names and started looking at the letter N, since my name starts with the same letter. He then found Nile Red, a colouring compound, and it had a nice ring to it without sounding too much like a chemical.’