NileRed

Nigel Braun was born on September 7, 1991, in Montreal, Quebec,^[4] to Dorian Braun, a sound engineer and former college professor, and Jody Tanaka. His younger brother, Corey, helps manage the channel. Before starting a YouTube channel, Braun was a trained laboratory technician in an organic chemistry lab.^[5] He later began a Master's degree program in chemistry at McGill, but left it to focus on the NileRed channel.^[6][2][4]

Braun had been making videos, mainly tutorials, for fun since his mid-teenage years, then creating a YouTube channel on March 10, 2014. His first video was uploaded on March 24, 2014, and most of his early videos were recordings of his projects as a laboratory technician then at his parents' garage, with them later being filmed at his industrial-grade laboratory.^[2] Braun wanted his channel name, NileRed, to be related to chemistry, but not too chemical-sounding. He and one of his university colleagues looked through a book containing chemical names and started with "N" because his name began with the same letter. They settled on nile red, a compound for dyeing used in biochemistry and microbiology, as it sounded good and did not sound much like a chemical. A second channel, NileBlue, was created in 2016 to showcase more casual projects than the main channel, and a shorts channel, NileRed 2 (formerly NileRed Shorts), was created in 2021.^[7][8] He is assisted in his channel by two family members and two friends he hired.^[2]

Some of Braun's videos were deleted in 2018 during a purge of chemistry channels.^[5] In 2019 and 2020, the web magazine Hackaday reported on Braun extracting bismuth from pepto bismol,^[9] making aerogel,^[10] and making superconductors.^[11] In 2021, The A.V. Club and Newsweek reported on a video of him dissolving a hot dog in piranha solution, which went viral.^[12][13]