Slime, Brands, and the Internet

an OG Slimes Review

Recently, for reasons tangential to this review, my mom suggested that I “take a self-care day”. Her examples were “get a massage” or “go out for a nice dinner”. Always one to listen to my mom, I went to ogslimes.com and bought Sea Salt Bath, a Silica x Sand slime in their Spa Day Restock. It retailed for $17.99 (plus $9 in shipping) and delayed my self-care day to a delivery date two weeks later.

I was out of town when the slime arrived, and on the three-hour drive back to my apartment, I kept thinking to myself: when I get home, I get to open my new slime. When I get home, I get to open my new slime. More than the comfort of my own bed or the opportunity to take a hot shower, the potential energy of Sea Salt Bath was the thing calling me back.

When I got home, I did, indeed, open my new slime.

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I remember when buying slime online first became popular. I was in high school, and one of my best friends had a younger sister who sold her slime on Etsy. Early on, we regarded her entrepreneurship as a joke. At lunch, as freshmen, we would watch the videos on her slime-dedicated Instagram account and laugh. My friend would point to disembodied hands in some of the clips and say “that’s me—she made me hold the tub for that one”.

I remember when she started getting more followers. I would Venmo my friend for his little sister’s slime, and he’d bring it to school for me the next day. Wasn’t it funny? That I was supporting this precocious middle schooler’s weird hobby?

I remember when I went over to that friend’s house a few months later, and the entire upstairs floor of his family’s McMansion had been converted into a slime factory; packing peanuts, empty bubble mailers, industrial stand-mixer and all. Ha ha! Isn’t that crazy?

I remember when my friend told me that his younger sister was making thousands of dollars a month from her slime shop. His parents were fully supportive of the business, but they were making her put all the money into a college fund. We didn’t really make fun of it at lunch anymore.

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Sea Salt Bath by OG Slimes is described on their website as “feels crunchy,” experiences “fall-out,” and smells like “Coastal Air, Driftwood”. This is all correct.

The slime’s fragrance reminds me of men’s deodorant, the Dove Men+Care one in particular. If the scent were a Bath and Body Works 3-wick candle from my youth, my mom would’ve put that candle in her downstairs bathroom and it would’ve overpowered the room for months. Sometimes I’ve caught a lingering whiff of liquid-glue-smell on my fingers after playing with Sea Salt Bath, which is both unpleasant and uncommon compared to the other OG Slimes slimes that I’ve owned.

Every purchase from OG Slimes (and most popular slime shops) comes with a small packet of Borax and play/care instructions. Sea Salt Bath also comes with a small wooden spoon, which to my knowledge is purely aesthetic. It’s hard for me to imagine what the other people who bought Sea Salt Bath are doing with their tiny wooden spoons right now. Mine is still on my kitchen table, where I first opened the package.

The slime base itself is clear, but the blue-tinted silica rocks and blue sand add-in give the slime an aqua hue. The slime crackles nicely, inflates wonderfully, and has a crystal taffy-like quality when pulled. The clear base, when inflated, practically shimmers in the light, and the pops in this slime are truly sensational. Will jokes that I have a “type” with slimes, and this slime is definitely my type.

One thing I have learned, which I did not previously know, is that silica means ROCKS. From the moment I first became aware of silica slimes to a few days ago when I first played with one, I mistakenly assumed they contained some larger (and theoretically non-poisonous) form of silica gel. This was an erroneous miscalculation on my part. The OG Slimes website warns you, so there’s really no one to blame except myself, but silica rocks can “be a bit pokey”. They are very pokey, especially if you’re expecting the forbidden fruit, soft-yet-firm texture of those silica gel packets. Just a word to the wise. I love Sea Salt Bath, but I would say that playing with it is a no pain, no gain textural experience. In the words of My Editor, upon watching me handle it: “that looks like it hurts”.

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But there’s so much to say about slime, and about OG Slimes in particular. There’s their digital marketing strategy, where they consistently post “scoopability ratings” videos every week for each of their new slimes in their weekly slime drop (Fridays at 6 pm EST). They post ASMR versions of all of their videos, and sometimes they post a “Voiceover Edition” where an AI-generated Family Guy character does the voiceover.

There’s this video, where the young moguls of OG Slimes are finally in front of the camera, describing their business, process, and passion (they seem lovely).

There’s the way that so many of their slimes are not only based on things, but on specific brands of specific things. Sea Salt Bath’s label is designed to look like Dr Teal’s Pure Epsom Salt. OG Labo is modeled after, you guessed it, Le Labo candles.

What does it all mean? Who’s buying this stuff? (Besides me.) Surely the buyers of slime are mostly women (and most reviews on the OG Slimes website appear to be written by women). It seems plausible that the buyers of slime are old enough to have their own money, to spend $27.38 for 7 ounces of well-branded goo. This market enjoys interesting textures, nice smells. There’s something Lush-adjacent about the company, something that scratches my Mini Brands itch. Slime is a physical product that exploded because of the internet. It is a tactile experience trafficked in online views.

From “What’s with the “slime”?” on r/OutOfTheLoop: “It's a middle school trend. Just like the Dab, flipping water bottles and those fidget spinners. They just like annoying things.” But what if you’re WRONG, INeedAMargarita? What if there’s something very fascinating here about the interplay between physical existence and virtual reality? What you’re really doing, INeedAMargarita, is just the same thing I was doing back in high school: ridiculing the interests of girls (and/or young women) because, without the joy of slime, all you have is your negativity!

So what if my cold little world gets a dopamine rush from each new OG Slimes YouTube Short that I get to see? There’s something so enjoyable about my mental perception of someone else’s physical sensation, mediated by the familiar tropes of short-form video! I live for those weekly drops! I have to see what the next restock theme will be! Is slime all I have to live for? I…I—uh. I’m getting stressed out. Thank God I just bought a new sensory relaxation toy. Thank God I have Sea Salt Bath.

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I’m not saying that you should buy expensive slime. I’m not even saying that you should care about it. I think that if you want to buy expensive slime, OG Slimes stands out to me among the popular online slime shops (Snoopslimes and Slime Obsidian are other major players that come to mind in this weird, toy-adjacent industry).

What I’m really interested in is what we—royal we—regard as popular culture. What do we take seriously, as artifacts of our history? At the time of writing this, OG Slimes has 1.4 million followers on Instagram and 1.7 million followers on TikTok. Their most popular YouTube Shorts have tens of millions of views.

Maybe it’s just an “annoying thing”, but maybe we’re looking at a physical by-product of our time—the nexus between quarantine-era TikTok (at-home activity, yearning for physical experience, comfort/ASMR media) and modern aestheticized branding for women (the post-Glossier America, if you will). What would it mean if OG Slimes released a Graza olive oil slime? What if they started doing influencer collaborations?

The slime world is a sticky, fascinating thing, just like the normal world, and just like Sea Salt Bath. 4 stars.