RESCENE's Geoje Video by the Numbers: 10M Views, Gyaru Boom

What happened

On 22 May 2026 Woni’s YouTube channel, 안녕하세요원이입니다잘부탁드립니다, published ‘갸루와 거제에 왔습니다 (거제 1편)’ (‘I came to Geoje with a gyaru, Geoje part 1’). In it Woni, RESCENE’s leader, who was born in Geoje on Korea’s south coast, takes bandmate Minami — the group’s Japanese member, playing the gyaru (갸루, a Japanese youth style of the 1990s) character from the channel’s earlier episodes — to her hometown. Sisa Journal reported the video at 2.5 million views within three days of upload and five million within ten days. A second part, ‘갸루와 거제 2편’, followed on 5 June.

On 15 July Sports Kyunghyang reported that the first episode had passed 10 million cumulative views, one day after RESCENE took their first music show win with ‘Pretty Girl’ on The Show. The watch page showed 13,110,828 views on 26 August 2026; the second episode stood at 6,393,095.

Two things travelled beyond the view count: the fishing scene produced a second catchphrase after ‘거제 야호’ (the greeting born in an earlier episode), and Money Today tied the video to a measurable rise in Korean interest in gyaru styling itself — search volume, salon requests and cosmetics releases.

Why is it trending?

News Culture’s 26 June analysis traced the meme ‘파라파라나 춰야겠다’ (‘I’d better dance the parapara’) to the episode. Its account of the scene: while Woni concentrated on fishing, Minami, in gyaru styling, announced without any lead-up that she would dance the parapara, followed with the chant ‘물고기 물고기 오이데’ (‘fish, fish, oide’ — oide is Japanese for ‘come here’) and closed with ‘마떼루요’ (‘matteru yo’, ‘I’ll wait’). What spread, the paper argued, was the sentence, intonation and expression rather than the dance: users kept the structure and changed only the situation, so ‘파라파라나 춰야겠다’ moved as a template on its own while the parapara dance itself never became a short-form trend.

Money Today put numbers on the wider effect on 5 July. Naver keyword searches for ‘갸루’ rose from 19,000 in March to 44,000 in May 2026, more than doubling in two months, and the paper named the starting point as two RESCENE scenes — Minami’s ‘거제 야호’ in gyaru make-up and the parapara dance on the Geoje trip. A hair designer at a salon in Hongdae, Seoul, told the paper that customers arriving with photos of Minami to ask for ‘gyaru concept’ styling had noticeably increased in the previous month, to about one gyaru make-up every two days. Colour-cosmetics brands followed: Colorgram released a ‘갸루 짱구’ product and Wakemake a ‘갸루 키티 에디션’. Money Today reported that unnamed experts read the trend not as an adoption of past Japanese culture as it was, but as a reinterpretation, through RESCENE, into a Korean form of play. Pop-culture critic Kim Sung-soo told the paper that today’s 2030 generation, with a weaker belief than earlier generations that effort alone secures the future, tends to find solace in subcultures that let it express its own identity, and that RESCENE — a group with dialect, regional sentiment and a human image — draws fans by evoking their own lives directly. Minami’s disclosure that her own mother had once been a gyaru, Kim said, had also lowered the psychological barrier to gyaru culture.

The episode’s window shows in the channel’s and the song’s numbers too. Sisa Journal’s timeline has the channel passing 400,000 subscribers on 26 May, four days after upload, and approaching 700,000 by 4 June; Kyunghyang put it past 750,000 on 8 June after the episode spread on X; and SisaIN, writing on 9 July, dated the channel’s growth past one million subscribers to this upload. ‘LOVE ATTACK’, RESCENE’s 2024 title track, re-entered the Melon TOP100 on 28 May, six days after the video, and was 18th on that chart at 9 p.m. on 4 June. Those were the first steps of a reverse run that, Money Today reported, first topped Melon’s TOP100 on 8 July 2026, as Hankook Ilbo later dated it, and was reported at number one on 9 July, about two years after release; that run is covered in “How RESCENE’s ‘LOVE ATTACK’ Hit No. 1 Two Years After Release”. Kyunghyang added one production detail: Solfa Studio, which makes the channel, gave up the video’s ad revenue in order to use Joe Hisaishi’s ‘Summer’, the theme from Kikujiro, in the scene where the two play in the sea.

Geoje itself followed up. Sisa Journal noted the city had appointed RESCENE as promotional ambassadors two months after ‘거제 야호’ first appeared (the four-city sequence is covered in “Why Four Korean Cities Made RESCENE Their Ambassador”). On 17 June Geoje Times reported that the city had produced its own YouTube content with the group: a vlog of Woni travelling her hometown with the members through Geoje Botanic Garden, the Geoje cable car and the Sipja cave at Haegeumgang, tasting the newly launched ‘jungle bread’, with plans to re-cut it into Shorts for the city’s official channel. The paper called it a shift from administration-led promotion to marketing built on popular content and the YouTube algorithm.

What you need to know

• ‘갸루와 거제에 왔습니다 (거제 1편)’ was published on Woni’s channel on 22 May 2026; ‘갸루와 거제 2편’ followed on 5 June.
• Velocity: 2.5 million views in three days and five million in ten days (Sisa Journal); 10 million by 15 July (Sports Kyunghyang); 13,110,828 on the watch page on 26 August 2026.
• The second catchphrase — ‘파라파라나 춰야겠다’, ‘물고기 물고기 오이데’, ‘마떼루요’ — comes from the fishing scene; News Culture analysed it on 26 June as a sentence meme rather than a dance trend.
• Money Today (5 July): Naver searches for ‘갸루’ went from 19,000 in March to 44,000 in May 2026; a Hongdae salon reported gyaru styling requests about every other day; Colorgram and Wakemake released gyaru-concept editions.
• ‘LOVE ATTACK’ re-entered the Melon TOP100 on 28 May 2026, six days after the upload, and was 18th by 4 June (Sisa Journal).
• Geoje Times (17 June): the city produced a tourism vlog with RESCENE — Geoje Botanic Garden, the cable car, the Sipja cave at Haegeumgang, ‘jungle bread’ — for re-cutting into Shorts on its official channel.