Everyone Claims They Invented Slime
In November 2025, slime made it into the National Toy Hall of Fame. Deserved! We have been waiting for that moment for a long time.
It went in alongside Battleship and Trivial Pursuit, two games with very tidy paper trails. Battleship has a patent. Trivial Pursuit was dreamed up by two Canadian journalists over a Scrabble board in 1979.
Slime doesn’t have that kind of paper trail.
So let’s get down to the history lesson.
The green trash can
February, 1976, Mattel dropped a toy called slime. It was green. It was watery. It was slippery. And it came in a plastic trash can. Our co-founders have vivid memories of this from their childhood.
A Mattel materials scientist described it as a reversible cross-linking gel, which is a very serious way to say guar gum and borax. Vegetable-grade guar gum is the same stuff that thickens ice cream.
It sold instantly and spawned a swarm of copycats, partly because the formula was never patented. Later versions came with rubber worms and eyeballs.
But here's the part we love: nobody can tell you who at Mattel came up with it. No patent, so no named inventor. Anywhere. The company got the credit, and the person vanished into the ether. You'll find a name if you search hard enough, but the trail leads to websites that contradict themselves mid-paragraph, and the name they keep using actually belongs to Silly Putty's story.
The lawsuit that never happened
Silly Putty wasn’t really slime but it was bouncy and similar and came out thirty years before slime did.
During World War II, researchers hunting for a synthetic rubber substitute found something else entirely: a silicone compound that bounced, stretched, and shattered when smacked.
James Wright at General Electric usually gets the credit. Earl Warrick at Dow Corning spent decades insisting it was him, and he had receipts: a patent filed in March 1943, a year before Wright's.
It was never settled.
The putty itself sat around as a lab curiosity until a marketer named Peter Hodgson noticed that it pulled up newspaper print - an exact copy - when you pressed on the paper. He stuffed it into plastic eggs around 1949 and gave it a name.
A new toy was born.
Hasbro packaged a goo called Flubber in 1962 and pulled it after a rash problem. Wham-O’s Super Stuff showed up in the mid-sixties. So by the time Mattel arrived, slime had been oozing toward shelves for decades. But Mattel was first to the word.
The bucket no one threw out
Our favorite origin story involves no laboratory at all.
In 1979, a Canadian sketch show called You Can't Do That on Television started shooting in Ottawa. A dungeon sketch needed fake sewage, so the crew filled a bucket with cafeteria scraps and water. Then production stalled, because child performers can only work so many hours, and the bucket sat. For about a week.
It came back green.
They used it anyway and dumped it on a cast member on camera. The show made it a rule: anyone who says, "I don't know," would get slimed.
Nickelodeon brought the show to American kids a couple of years later, carried the green slime into Double Dare and Figure It Out, and eventually built an entire awards show around dumping it on celebrities. Kids’ Choice has been slinging slime at A-listers since 2002.
The original recipe gets repeated as pudding, applesauce, oatmeal, and food coloring. Treat that as legend. It changed constantly, and the Double Dare crew reportedly ditched the oatmeal version. There was Gak in the 90s (anyone remember?).
Then there was a bit of slime dormancy.
Then teenagers in Thailand made it a genre
In 2014, a handmade “slime,” made by kids in Thailand went viral. Like… really viral.
It became a global phenomenon. By 2016, it was everywhere.
Slime was the number one searched term in 2017, per Google’s own year-end data. Over the years, new textures were invented and it morphed into what we all know and love today (you can browse our slime here).
Part of the pull was tapping into multiple senses at once - touch, sight, smell, and sound. ASMR researchers confirmed what makes slime such a reliable trigger. So when you think about it now, an entire generation met slime through headphones and screens instead of a toy aisle.
Nobody owns it, which is the point
Sloomoo has every texture you can imagine - from cloud, cloud creme, cloud dough and clear to butter, floam, slushee, thick and glossy, and more.
And the Sloomoo world is one that is dedicated to the wonders of slime - the journey of its sounds, sensations, and joy.
Hope to see you in our universe.
