How To Make The Best Crunchy Slime

Ever since 2016, making slime has taken the world by storm, and four years on it shows no signs of stopping. It's expanded into a rainbow of colours and crazy textures. Creating your own slime teaches your little ones about chemistry, and unleashes your little ones' creativity with the addition of glitter, beads and toys!

There are a few myths out there about how to create the perfect slime, and we've made our fair share of botched batches in the process of finding the perfect slime recipe.  Crunchy slime is our new obsession, and we're excited to share just how you can create crunchy slime at home!

Tips before you begin

Some chemicals may be dangerous for little ones, so we recommend grown-ups take the lead in handling all chemicals, and young children are supervised when playing with their crunchy slime.

Make sure kids don't consume any of the saline solution, as it can cause an upset tummy.

When playing with slime, remember your children must clean their hands thoroughly afterwards and use soap, especially before eating.

Store your crunchy slime in an airtight container, and you can keep it to play with for up to a week.

Crunchy Slime Recipe

Your kids won't be able to get enough of this crunchy slime recipe, we're sure once you've tried it you'll want to make crunchy slime in every colour!

What you need:

2 cup of white school glue (We used Elmers)

Your favourite colour of food colouring

A small bag of styrofoam beads

Contact cleaning saline solution with borax acid in it

¼ teaspoon of baking soda

A bottle of shaving cream

A large plastic mixing bowl

A spoon

Instructions:

Pour all of the school-glue into your mixing bowl.

Add the baking soda and mix until your slime is well combined.

Add a couple of drops of your chosen colour of food colouring, and mix into the gluey baking soda concoction. You may want to add more for a darker colour.

Squeeze the shaving cream into your mixture. You may add as little or as much as you want, but the more you use, the more of a fluffy texture your slime will have. We recommend spraying for 5 seconds to get a good amount of foam. Stir again so it's all combined.

Pour some of the contact lens solution into the stirred mixture. A grown-up should add this by dripping a little bit into the mixture and stirring, before adding more. Keep going until your slime mixture has stopped sticking to the sides of the bowl.

Using your hands, mix the slime into a ball. If it's still a bit sticky, add more of the contact lens solution, and if you've added a little bit too much by accident, just pop some more glue into your mix to get the right consistency of stretchy slime.

Now it's time to make your slime crunchy! Pour your packet of styrofoam balls into the mix. If this makes it a little bit too stiff, just squirt some more glue into the solution.

Image: © Better Homes and Gardens

The Scientific Facts

Slime is made of polymers, which are long strings of molecules.

Adding the PVA glue to the saline solution makes the positions of the molecules change which is called cross-linking.

Slime is non-Newtonian, which means it isn't a liquid or a solid. You can pick it up and hold it in the same way as a solid, but it oozes like liquid.

Slime doesn't have a shape, and changes to fit the container you put it in.

When you make crunchy slime, you put solids inside of the non-Newtonian material.

It also bounces when you drop it because of elasticity.

When you quickly pull slime apart, it'll break because you're breaking the molecular bonds.

Don't have the ingredients?

If you're not able to get your hands on saline solution to make crunchy slime, you can swap it with laundry detergent,  liquid starch and borax powder, which contain the same chemicals to help make slime.

If you'd prefer not to use borax in your slime recipe, you can make your slime with lots of different ingredients instead. These two crunchy slime recipe ideas may not last as long, but are fun to play with!

You can mix chia seeds, water and cornstarch with your food colouring to make a natural slime.

For a yummy slime you can eat, our favourite recipe is made by melting marshmallows, adding icing sugar until the consistency is thick and slimy, and adding a little bit of cooking oil to make the slime recipe a little less sticky.