How to Make Homemade Slime for Halloween in the Name of Science

If you’re looking to be a little crafty this Halloween but not trying to put in as much time and work as your baking-frenzied friends, there’s something else you can make: slime.

We’re not talking about that green slime on Nickelodeon — this stuff is arguably even more entertaining (and easier to clean up).

The recipes below are simple enough to follow and all share the same main ingredient: old-school liquid glue. A lot of slime recipes online will tell you to use borax solution, also called sodium tetraborate, as a binding agent to make the slime stretchy. But this weird-smelling chemical, once a popular cleaning agent, is no longer a common household item, so the recipes here don’t call for borax. There are ingredients you can substitute for it that will take care of making the slime stretchy.

The rest of the ingredients are ordinary household items. Other recipes online call for ingredients not seen below, like corn starch, liquid detergent, dish soap, salt, and even air freshener. There are literally thousands of videos and recipes online that claim to make the best slime, so you’re guaranteed to find one to use with whatever limited resources you have.

Stretchy Slime

Ingredients: glue, baking soda, contact solution, water

This recipe makes a slime durable enough to stretch out some pretty impressive distances. First, pour about a cup of glue — which is the entirety of a normal-sized Elmer’s glue bottle — into a bowl. In a smaller bowl, mix together 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda and 1/4 cup of water, then add the solution into the glue. Once that’s mixed, add the contact solution, but only a few drops at a time. The solution makes the slime stick together and not to the bowl and your fingers. Make sure you don’t add too much, because it’ll harden the slime and make it less stretchy.

Use your hands to knead and mix the slime, and if you want to make it bigger and longer, go ahead and multiply the recipe.

Fluffy Slime

Ingredients: glue, shaving cream, contact solution

The key to making slime that’s extra puffy is shaving cream. After pouring an entire bottle of glue into the bowl, it’s time to add the shaving cream. How much you add is up to you — the more cream you add, the fluffier your slime will be. After mixing those two ingredients, add the contact solution a few drops at a time, just as with the Stretchy Slime recipe above. Again, adding too much will make the slime stiff.

Colorful/Sparkly Slime

Ingredients: either recipe above + glitter glue, glitter, and/or food coloring

There are a number of ways to make your slime a beautiful glittery mess: You can substitute glitter glues for some — or all — of the glue in your recipe. Liquid materials, like food coloring and watercolor paint, can make your slime a consistent color, and should be added to the glue at the beginning of the recipe. Feel free to add the glitter during this step, to make sure the glitter is spread evenly. There are some awesome patterns, designs and rainbows out there to find.