In 2020 Slime Bun (@slime.bun) had a foolproof formula for virality: if her nails were done, and the ring light positioned, her 900,000 followers could fall into the airy folds of her homemade slime—the non-Newtonian fluid toy, often glittered, textured, bedazzled, and charmed.
Slime Bun was just one of a class of influencers whose output popularized a new wave of slime, which first went viral in Southeast Asia in 2016. By 2017, Google reported it as the top YouTube trend. During Covid slime was everywhere: stirred, pulled, and popped on the For You Pages of the bored, the anxious, and the young. It was cheap to make at home, where everyone ended up during the pandemic anyway. The standard recipe is polyvinyl acetate (Elmer’s Glue) mixed with borax; children could, and did, run profitable slime businesses beyond the frames of their Zoom classes. (My coworker’s roommate bought one of these kid’s products, and it arrived with a chicken scratch note in Sharpie: THANKS FOR BEING MY FIRST SALE HOPE YOU LOVE YOUR SLIME.)
But in April of 2021, when most people were ready to return to society, Slime Bun posted a pink sunset with a question written over it: where did slime bun go? Having a slime career on top of her regular 9-5 was getting to her, she explained, and she had decided to quit. Many other slimers have also gone dormant. Some of the decline was inevitable—the child-founders of slime companies have grown up. Others, like Slime Bun, situational. Was it possible for the trend, fomented in lockdown, to survive in an open world? Or had the slimy bubble popped? Away from my phone, in the middle of SoHo, there was a business that begged to differ.
The Sloomoo Institute was founded by Karen Robinovitz and Sara Schiller in 2019, first in New York and now with locations in Atlanta, Houston, Chicago, and LA. Its flagship location shares a block with banks, fashion outlets, and a weed store. Like many immersive experiences—especially the Museum of Ice Cream, a quarter mile north—Sloomoo is a cavernous retail space with different kinetic and Instagrammable stations (slingshotting a hunk of slime at a plexiglass pane; sticking ribbons of slime to a communal slime wall; running barefoot across a shallow puddle). In one of many Sloomoo baptisms, everyone’s first task upon entering is to fill out a name tag and replace all the vowels with “oo,” which produces a slime name. I became Ooloonoo. My friend who came along: Moonoo. Then the Experience could begin.
The slime itself mostly sits in white, retrofuturist bird baths made of fiberglass shapes stacked atop one another. These egg-like pillars dot the Institute’s rooms and hallways. When they go untouched and the slime settles into a still pool, it’s hard not to lightly graze it with your fingers, then forcefully prod all five into the middle. From there you can use any number of playing techniques. Grab a handful and stretch; grab two handfuls and pull them apart to create a thin sheet, which can be acrobatically joined to make a bubble; knead and indent. Most interactions with slime are power struggles. (It’s a faux pas to let the slime break off into globs.) The other important thing to know is that slime is scented. Unlike skin, where perfume dissolves within hours, the polymer never releases aroma.
During my visit, I met Jerry—Joorroo—the warm, spirited, and eagle-eyed Sloomoo general manager wearing a polo shirt tucked into jeans. He joined Robinovitz and Schiller after running hospitality services at a conference center on Park Avenue. He led me to what they call the kitchen, where employees dump ingredients into commercial grade dough mixers. “The brand that owns Elmer’s, they were not doing well,” Joorroo told me, “until the resurgence of slime.” (Elmer’s, he feels, makes the best product.) “We came and we made it a global phenomenon.” All of Sloomoo’s slimes are designed by Chase Kellebrew, a 21-year-old the founders poached from his online platform, which he started when he was 13. There’s Cloudy, made with a wet, sandy texture accomplished through artificial snow. Butter is an oilier product. If you’ve ever seen a viral slime video, it was probably Thick & Glossy—shiny, puffy, with the matte-yet-sleek look of the low-flake paint used on delivery trucks. Joorroo asked me if I had heard of the new texture Chase had recently invented. “It’s a wax slime,” he murmured, eyes glowing; the wax shell set on top allows for crème brulée-like destruction.
In the basement’s packing room, a few employees wore bedazzled air traffic control headphones as they packed slime into circular plastic containers. When I talked to Robinovitz and Schiller later by Zoom, they told me that in their first four months of business in 2019, they had 30,000 customers a month. “It was literally bonkers,” Robinovitz said. “We were flying the plane and fixing the engine.” When the pandemic hit, they started packing slime themselves to sell online. And despite some wane in individual slime creators, the demand for the products hasn’t stopped; Amazon keeps reporting increases in searches. Sloomoo’s physical presence has not only expanded but upped its technology; Schiller said that they’re also looking to go international, primarily in the Middle East and Asia.
“Slime supersedes economic and social status,” Joorroo told me when I asked about the ebbs and flows of e-commerce. (At that point, we were standing in a windowless party room lined with troll-hair wallpaper.) “I’ve slimed with kids who come here on field trips, because it’s sometimes just not affordable for their family. And I’ve slimed with royal families. The future prince and princesses of countries? I’ve shown them how to make bubbles.”
Back upstairs, Joorroo directed my attention to a 5-year-old, on his birthday, about to get slimed inside a shallow tank-stage known as Sloomoo Falls. The pink jumpsuited employee running the place was named Doorooroos (Darius). The kid had been wrapped in multiple clear hooded ponchos, stood uncertainly while Doorooroos paced across the tank’s perforated rubber floor.
Getting slimed requires humiliation; it happens when you give the wrong answer to some kind of trivia question. Doorooroos tried to think of an appropriate query for a 5-year-old. He spoke into his headset and his voice sounded over the speakers: “What team does LeBron James play for?”
The kid further ensconced himself in plastic, then squeaked from inside the hood: “Basketball.”
Doorooroos felt like this was close enough. He went over, consulted with the kid’s dad and trotted back. “When’s your dad’s birthday?”
The kid was silent. Then he said, inexplicably: “Spider-Man.”
Not even Doorooroos could salvage this as an answer. High above, standing on a platform just behind the tank’s back wall, another employee tipped over plastic jugs of a blue, loosely viscous slime-cousin, and as waves of it spun down toward the kid and smacked against his back, he crouched further into a standing fetal position. Joorroo leaned over to me, conscious of the rudimentary mechanics. (Other locations have automated dispensers.) Despite his posture, the kid smiled when he left the tank. “It felt good,” he said.
When my friend and I went next after Joorroo wrapped us in more ponchos and two shower caps, there were no questions. It’s hard to tell you, really, what being slimed feels like. What stuck with me most, more than the slick residue left on my calves and the delightful absurdity, was how I didn’t want it to end.
It made sense that Sloomoo included getting slimed in its activities, since most parents with young children grew up with the concept. But getting slimed and slime are quite different. Slime has a history beyond the FYP. It became widely available in 1943 with Silly Putty, the winner in a race to commodify new rubber alternatives developed during World War II shortages. These materials have been therapeutic since their invention, and they attach to any given social catastrophe. “It means five minutes of escape from neurosis,” the original Silly Putty manufacturer told The New Yorker in 1950. “It means not having to worry about Korea or family difficulties.” Today slime plays the same role. Therapists use it, and it’s known as especially beneficial for kids with disabilities; “sensory play” toys have been shown to help people who have trouble processing stimuli, whether from ADHD or more physical conditions.
Being slimed, on the other hand, is overwhelming and public. It became known as a Nickelodeon invention through You Can’t Do That On Television, originally a Canadian sketch show that the network started distributing in the early 1980s. When a kid would say “I don’t know” in response to a question—never mind “Spider-Man”—that’s when it would happen. Over time slime became a staple on the network’s Double Dare, and then it started squirting out of every other Nickelodeon orifice, like those inside podiums and mystery boxes at the Kid’s Choice Awards. (I invite you to watch the forceful sliming of Katy Perry at the 2010 show.) The slime recipe at the start was offensive—made from Cream of Wheat or oatmeal, baby shampoo, even discarded food. It eventually turned glossier, slicker, and more neon, until it became “very beautiful slime, heavily art-directed slime,” as a producer once put it. “Grown-ups took control of the slime and made it pretty.”
Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon’s Golden Age, by Mathew Klickstein, contains a lot of information about its psychic presence in kids’ television. “They all hated it,” sliming’s co-creator Geoffrey Darby said. “The parents didn’t really care one way or another, but one of the kids described it as standing under the rear of a cow when it lifts its tail.” Producers above all romanticized being slimed as a leveler among kid contestants, or even as an act of resistance. “Slime was a way for kids to ‘act up’ to adults,” the producer Alan Goodman said. “To punish them for the crime of being parents.” It was even something, one producer claimed, that related to an internal Nickelodeon concept called “URST”—Unresolved Sexual Tension—which they thought crucial in tween and teen programming; “Slime was a big part of how we perceived URST,” the writer and producer Scott Webb said. “It’s, ‘When I go out and get messy, I’m doing something I know my parents don’t approve of. But man, it feels good.’” Accordingly, getting slimed faced opposition from predictable sources, like the “violence on television” studies done by George Gerbner, the sociologist who founded cultivation theory. “He would give us a violence rating for slime that would count the same as a decapitation,” the network exec Geraldine Laybourne said.
Getting slimed may require humiliation, but the reward for going through it is pride. It’s the perfect symbol for the Gen X, latchkey kid mentality, in which nurturing may have been in low supply but awesomeness certainly wasn’t. It’s easy to pit this type of slime against our newer, viral sensory slime in an argument about what’s good for kids: do we want them to get slimed—to fall down, be unsupervised, brave the wilderness? Or do we want them soothed with sensory pleasures? Privileging one over the other would be a conservative position no matter what. What’s interesting, and elusive, is the right Hippocratic balance of the slimes.
At Sloomoo, my friend and I made our own slimes with the help of zoomer slime techs. I thought I’d keep things chic with a clear slime base colored silver and scented with Jasmine—chosen from a bar including Birthday Cake, but also Sweet Cilantro, Soft Tuberose, and Leather—while Moonoo infused her bronze-colored Icee texture with peanut butter aroma. We pressed flat plastic “charms” into the surface of the gloop. Giddy, I laughed at everything Moonoo said while we kneaded our slime into homogeneity. She nearly got sick from all the perfume. Joorroo, vigilant but ecstatic, approached to tell us that we were having “too much fun.”
As I left with bags full of slime, the product seemed to expand beyond its confines. Outside of the guidance of Sloomoo, slime doesn’t inherently claim, like other trendy toys, to make children smarter or more tolerant or into tiny professionals. It just is. It is abstract, like the instructions given to the special effects artist Steve Johnson when designing “Slimer,” the villain from Ghostbusters: a smile with arms (instructions Johnson could only follow, reportedly, after doing cocaine and imagining John Belushi’s ghost). This is what makes slime exciting, of course: that it is malleable, a wonderful and terrifying quality, even if the internet will eventually leave it behind as it does everything else. Slime embodies more permanent forces—the constant possibilities of childhood and the chaos of growing up, those truly rule-breaking processes, those non-Newtonian fluids.