The Sloomoo Institute has opened a new hands-on, sensory experience in Buckhead last month. It’s a colorful place filled with slime showers, a slime wall, various ooey-gooey interactive elements, and a sensory room with kinetic sand. “City Lights” producer Summer Evans spoke via Zoom with the “slime queen” herself, co-founder Karen Robinovitz, who shared her thoughts on the joys of slime.
Interview highlights:
A childhood slime enthusiast rediscovering its magic:
“When I first discovered slime, I was four years old. I played with the Mattel version, and I have the really distinct memories of being a complete slime fanatic, having every single variety. That was the only thing I wanted as a holiday gift or any kind of present. There were epic fights in my house because I was not the neatest child,” recalled Robinovitz. “Now I’m flashing forward to my late 40s, and I actually was going through a very, very hard time in my life with a lot of loss, a lot of tragedy around me, and intense grief and mourning… One day, a friend of mine came by, and her daughter was with her, and her daughter was ten and happened to have slime, and she had today’s slime, which is handmade and really beautifully colored and scented, and I was very curious about it, especially because of my early childhood love of the non-Newtonian fluid.”
She went on, “Four hours went by, and I didn’t even hang out with my friend. I was just all up in the slime world with her daughter, talking about all the different textures, trying to understand the nuance. She was showing me all the things you do with today’s slime, how you can make bubbles, how it makes pops… When they were leaving, I kind of realized that this semblance of time was my first time in probably two years where I had a genuine smile.”
How Robinovitz realized she could spread happiness through slime:
“I wanted my really close friend to experience it because A, she has two daughters, and B, she was going through an incredibly stressful time as well. Her husband had a stroke, and it led to a brain injury, and the result is that he is disabled and he doesn’t have the ability to speak anymore, and he really can’t do any activities of daily living without support. And she has a daughter who has a genetic syndrome with all the same symptoms,” Robinovitz recounted. “I said, ‘I know this sounds wild, but I have to give you slime. I know that this is going to be something you’ll appreciate.'”
She went on, “It started as weekly slime dates, which became daily conversations and daily playing with slime, and getting both of her daughters involved, and seeing how her daughter, who is neurodivergent, really had this unbelievable happiness when playing with the slime; seeing her other daughter react to it, just the way we were playing together. It was like this incredible, magical thing, and I finally said, ‘We have to bring this to people…’ A year later, we opened Sloomoo Institute in New York, and now have three spaces.”
Ways slime can deepen your sensory awareness:
“One of the most important parts of our business is our philanthropic sensibility. I mean, we feel very strongly about supporting both mental health and neurodiversity, so we hired adults who are diagnosed on various levels of the spectrum and who are autistic. 85% of adults with autism cannot get jobs. We partner with MindUP, which is Goldie Hawn’s Foundation for mental wellness for kids globally. And the layers of that, for us, are just as important as playing with slime in our world, or kinetic sound, and getting into that mindset of play. But play is really healing, and play, when you play with other people and whether it’s your family or your friends, or you’re coming with your entire company, and it’s a corporate event, you’re connecting with them, and you find that suddenly both of your hands are in the slime or the sand or the other compounds that we have.”
“There’s a lot of hate in the world. When you come into Sloomoo, all of that is gone. It doesn’t matter what your belief system is; it doesn’t matter where you fall on the fence of politics. You know what matters? Playing. Just get out of your head, put your phone down. You get to let go of stress in our world,” said Robinowitz. “There’s science around the act of squeezing and how squeezing does relieve stress and tension. That’s what you do with slime. You squeeze, you’re smelling things, and the scent is the scent that is closest-tied to memory. So you’re smelling things that might remind you of something really amazing, or you’re smelling something new, and maybe you love that scent, and that’s the scent you decide to scent your slime with. And when you go home, even if you never play with it and you just smell it every now and then, you’re taken back to that joy.”
More information on the Sloomoo Institute and its new Atlanta location can be found at https://sloomooinstitute.com/
