Kids making “slime” from white glue, borax, and water have caused a nation-wide shortage of glue. Supposedly, tweens are creating slime “by the gallon”.
A couple of small containers of Elmer’s at Kroger, all other sizes gone, and a sign on the shelf that said “temporarily unavailable”.
*In the time it’s taken me to compose this post, Snopes has changed their story to “‘Slime’ Fad Boosts Sales of Elmer’s Glue, Reportedly Creates ‘Shortage’”.
Swear to god, I just noticed that. My daughter has been watching slime making videos on youtube for the last few days. We don’t have all the ingredients, so I told her to put together a list from some of the videos and we’d get the stuff next time we’re at target.
We were at target on Thursday…no glue, none. Not any glue at all (that she could have used for this project).
We asked up at the desk and all they said is ‘yeah, we’ve been out of elmers glue for the last few days’. So, we had the rest of the stuff, I told her we’d have to put the project off until the weekend when I’d be at the grocery store (today) or we’d be back at a different Target (tomorrow). I didn’t give it much thought and we left, she was kinda sulking.
When we got home she was watching some more videos, one in particular showing a girl making a “100# ball of slime”. At the beginning she showed her ingredients, which included, probably, 30+ bottles of glue and my daughter commented that that’s probably why there’s no glue. I explained to her that one girl buying up all the glue at a bunch of stores (which she said she did) isn’t why there’s no glue at the one Target we stopped at.
Having said all that, I had no idea that all these videos are so popular that they’re wiping out all the supplies across the country.
ETA, just quickly looking online, it looks like about half the Targets in my area are wiped out of Clear Glue and Amazon is about 6 times the price.
This is what I’ve noticed too: dozens of gallon jugs of glue near the registers at Michaels a couple of weeks ago. Until I later saw a video of a couple of kids who got bad burns from making glue (with borax as an ingredient) I was unaware of this new fad, so at the time I had no idea why the hell there was a glue display.
I just googled that and while I didn’t watch the video, I do see that there’s one viral video about a girl that got nasty burns (and possibly a few other kids that may have been burned as well).
I understand that borax can be dangerous, but it generally isn’t. It’s typically just an irritant. My guess is that she has sensitive skin and/or is allergic to it (or one of the other ingredients). One of the articles also said that she was playing with it for a long time. I’m also curious if she used too much? My daughter is a rule/recipe follower. But these slime recipes are kinda fun and after making them a few times they’re just asking to be altered. What if I use more contact lens solution? What if I use more shaving cream? Less water? More glue? You see where this is going, right? Maybe instead of a teaspoon of borax, she used a few tablespoons. Maybe she just tried kneading dry borax into the end product to see what would happen so she had the powder on her hands. If she didn’t wash her hands when she was done, it may have been on them for hours afterwards.
It’s hard to say without knowing the details, but considering that enough kids have been making slime to cause a shortage of glue in the last week or two and borax has been in regular use for all kinds of household applications for nearly a hundred years, that the fact that this only happened to a handful of kids, I’d call it a fluke. It’s not that this is some new diet fad that put hundreds of people in the hospital with food poisoning or new toy that came out for christmas that was injuring kids (hoverboards, jarts etc).
I don’t know what happened with her, but so far it seems to just be her and a very small handful of other people.
Yeah, so far I’ve only heard about two girls, one from the US and the other from the UK. I have really sensitive skin like a lot of redheads and have used borax without issue dozens of times, even to scrub clothes with, so they must’ve really over done it or had an allergy.
When my daughter was getting ready to make slime a few days ago, she was reading off the ingredients and I was telling her where to get them. When she got to borox, I told her I’d get it for her (but not yet, we don’t (didn’t) even have the glue yet). When she asked why, I told her that while it’s safe as long as she’s careful, it’s still something you need to be careful with, and being a bit on the over cautious side myself, I didn’t really want her going up and down a set of stairs to get an open box of borox of a high shelf in the basement.
Of course, I was more concerned about her doing something and having a big poof of it in the air and inhaling it.
Checking wiki says “no skin irritation is known to exist due to borax”.
And now that I’m thinking about it, not only do we not know, for sure, that it was a reaction (allergic or just a chemical burn) to the the borox. Are we even positive that there was actually borox in there? Again, I haven’t watched the video, I mean, if that the 10th time she made it, I’ll assume it was, but maybe she changed it up or maybe it was the first time she made it and she used the wrong thing. Maybe it was lye or drain opener or something else. Many of those slime recipes call for various types of detergent or liquid starch. It’s possible she asked for that and mom told her it was ‘by the washing machine’ or ‘under the sink’.
Again, I’m still working on the assumption that she’s allergic and/or has sensitive skin and/or used to much. IOW, she reacted to the borox. But without being there or having some sort of forensics test on the slime, I’m just tossing out ideas for conversation.
ETA, I didn’t look at the UK article, but with differences in the meanings of words, I’d really look into a incorrect ingredient on that one, what of ‘baking soda’ in the US means ‘bleach’ in the UK?. Probably not, but you know what I mean.
TLDR: If you give millions of kids a shopping list, tell them to find a bunch of [not quite] household ingredients and give them directions on how to mix them up. I don’t think it’s possible for a few to not get hurt.
During the Ice Bucket Challenge, a ton of people managed to hurt themselves by failing to simply dump a bucket of water on their head.
A while back, in the northern part of the US/Canada, it was sooo cold that people were boiling water, going outside and throwing it up in the air to watch it flash freeze. Easy, right…nooo. A surprising number of people threw it right in their own face. (When you think about it, though, it is hard to hold a pot by the handle and throw water away from you).