An Afternoon at Sloomoo Institute (And My Ongoing Confusion About Slime)

A few miles from where we live, there’s a place where things get stuck and don’t let go. La Brea Tar Pits, where woolly mammoths spent somewhere between 11,000 and 50,000 years getting trapped in asphalt without much of a chance to think about it. I didn’t expect to think about that while watching my kids elbow deep in bowls of pink and blue goo at a place called Sloomoo Institute, but that’s more or less where my head went. Same basic trap, same feeling of something harmless looking pulling you in and not quite letting go, just swap the asphalt for something scented like cheesecake.

Growing up in the 80’s, the closest thing to slime in my world was whatever green stuff Nickelodeon dumped on kids for saying the wrong word on TV. That was the extent of it. You watched it happen to someone else, you laughed, and that was that. So when my kids asked to spend a Saturday at Sloomoo Institute, a whole building dedicated to slime, in the middle of a brutal summer heatwave no less, I said yes mostly because it meant real air conditioning and a few hours indoors. I did not expect to come out the other side still turning the whole thing over in my head.

A Neighborhood Adjacent Outing

Sloomoo sits close enough to Larchmont Village and The Grove that you could easily turn the day into a bigger loop, shops on one side, a full shopping center on the other. We kept it simple and stuck to Sloomoo itself, letting the kids run the show. The building is bright pink and impossible to miss, kid friendly in a way that’s clearly been engineered down to the last detail, and especially built for exactly the crowd we brought. They were locked in before we’d even made it past the entrance.

Parking turned out to be the easiest part of the day. We valet parked and it came out to $11 for two hours, which felt like a genuine deal for this part of LA. No circling the block, no searching for a spot, just pull up and walk in.

Inside the Slime Factory

Once inside, the kids went straight for it. There’s a wall covered in dripping, gooped up paint and slime called “Sloomoo and Repeat” that they posed in front of, pointing and laughing at the colors dripping down from ceiling to floor. Then it was on to the real attraction. They dug their hands into a giant toilet shaped bowl of pink slime (yes, a toilet, that’s apparently the joke) and stretched it out in long ropes between each other, cracking up the entire time.

From there it was a full sensory tour. They mixed colors, sampled scents at a wall labeled V.I.B.E.S. (Very Intensely Beneficial Energizing Scents, according to the sign), and worked their way through a counter of powders and mix ins with names like Chocolate Brownie, Ginger Ale, and Cheesecake. They colored a batch blue with powder, stretched it, smelled it, compared textures like tiny slime sommeliers.

Of the 10 or 12 consistencies on offer, the one that got the loudest reaction was the butter slime, soft and spreadable, closer to frosting than anything I’d call a toy. If you upgrade to VIP, you can also get slimed yourself. You stand in a designated area, pull on a clear plastic covering, and staff drop slime on you from above. My crew passed on that one, but I watched a few older kids sign up for it like it was the headliner.

Where the Name Even Comes From

I looked into Sloomoo itself a bit, because a name like that has to have a story. Turns out it traces back to a viral trend from 2017, where slime fans online started replacing the vowels in their own names with “oo” and calling it their slime name. The founders, 2 friends who’d known each other for 17 years and who’d both found real comfort in slime during hard stretches of their own lives, built the whole brand around that joke and never looked back. Their stated mission is basically 1 word: joy. They’ve also partnered with the Goldie Hawn Foundation’s MindUP program on the mental health side of things, and they’ve done real work with a research team at RPI to make their slime biodegradable instead of just another thing headed for a landfill. None of that occurred to me while I was watching my kids stretch a rope of pink goo between each other, but it’s a nice footnote.

Here’s the Part I Still Don’t Get

I’ll be honest. I did not grow up playing with slime, and it just wasn’t something we asked for as kids in the 80’s. Now it’s 2026 and slime is its own economy. Kids make it, buy it, trade recipes for it, and watch other kids play with it online for hours at a stretch. The smell, the texture, the sound it makes when you squeeze it, there’s clearly something going on here that goes past “kids like messy stuff,” because kids have always liked messy stuff and it never turned into an entire retail category before.

It also apparently comes with its own sibling dynamics. I heard more than one story that day about older siblings raiding a younger sibling’s slime stash and holding it hostage, or straight up terrorizing them with it, dangling a favorite batch just out of reach until somebody cried. Nothing sends a little kid into a rage faster than watching an older brother or sister casually reach into their private slime collection like it’s public property. Some things about sibling relationships, apparently, never change no matter what the toy is.

And there’s a very specific kind of misery I noticed watching the kids wait their turn with a fresh batch of stress ball slime. One kid squeezing it, stretching it, clearly enjoying every second, while the others stand there with their hands half out, watching, waiting, not wanting to be rude and just grab it. It’s the exact same feeling as being in a group photo that’s getting passed around a room and watching it slowly make its way toward you, 2 people away, then 1, all while you’re dying to see how you turned out. Same low grade agony, just with more glitter involved.

So I did some digging on where the wider slime obsession came from, and it turns out this didn’t come from nowhere. It traces back to Nickelodeon.

In 1979, a Canadian sketch show called “You Can’t Do That on Television” started dumping a thick green goop on kids as a running gag, originally just leftover food slop that had congealed into something gooier after sitting out too long during filming. Nickelodeon picked up the show, and the slime bit became the thing everyone remembered. By the mid 80’s it had become a whole identity for the network. Double Dare built entire physical challenges around it. Kids’ Choice Awards started slimeing celebrities on stage. The Nickelodeon logo itself is a splat of slime. For a solid generation, getting slimed on TV was treated like a badge of honor, and kids watching at home wanted in on it.

That explains why slime became culturally loaded, but it doesn’t fully explain why it exploded again a decade ago with my kids’ generation specifically. For that, the internet is the bigger factor. Sometime in the mid 2010s, slime crossed paths with ASMR, the tingling, relaxed feeling some people get from certain sounds and visuals like whispering, tapping, or crinkling. Slime turned out to be a perfect match for it. The stretching, the popping, the crunch of add ins, all of it recorded up close on video. Slime channels on YouTube started racking up tens of millions of views, and slime stopped being just a toy and became its own watchable, satisfying genre. Psychologists who study this stuff point to something called vicarious control, the idea that watching someone else press and fold something perfectly smooth and predictable is calming, especially in a world that usually isn’t. Kids and adults both got hooked, but kids had the added layer of actually wanting to make and touch the stuff themselves, not just watch it.

Put those 2 things together, a network that spent decades turning slime into something aspirational and fun, and a generation of internet video built entirely around how satisfying it looks and sounds, and you land on something like Sloomoo Institute. A whole building designed around letting kids do in person what they’ve been watching for years on a screen. Smell it, color it, throw it, get thrown at with it, slap it on a wall, take it home in a little cup.

Worth the Trip

I still don’t fully get the appeal on a personal level, and I suspect I never will. But watching the kids run from station to station, comparing butter slime to the powder mixes, arguing about whose color turned out better, I didn’t need to get it. It was a great couple of hours, an easy parking situation, a much needed escape from the heat, and a genuinely unique way to spend a Saturday with my kids, close enough to Larchmont Village and The Grove that the rest of the afternoon was ours to figure out. Sometimes that’s enough.

And honestly, at the end of the day, slime itself is arbitrary. It could have been clay, or beads, or something else entirely, it just happens to be the thing that caught on with this generation. What it’s actually doing underneath all the marketing and the scented powders is getting kids into arts and crafts without them realizing that’s what’s happening, getting them off their screens for an afternoon, getting them making something with their own hands, feeling different textures, using their senses instead of just their thumbs. Something to collect. Something to trade. Something that doesn’t come with a screen attached. That part I get completely.