Once upon a time, there was a craze going around the land where kids would mix borax and glue together to make a crazy thing known as slime. Then it was discovered that borax wasn’t always gentle on skin and people started searching for ways to make slime without borax. 

I would love to say that our house was free from the slime making craze but it wasn’t. A while back after finding dried slime in our junk drawer and sun baked slime strands hanging from our picnic table, I outlawed slime. 

Slime was not allowed in our home under any circumstances! Or so I thought.

Then the glue kept disappearing and I couldn’t find my glitter or food coloring. Last week I found a hidden slime making factory in our kid’s bathroom. 

Part of me wants to be mad but then my daughter explained in precise scientific terms, some of which I’m not familiar with, the chemical reaction that changes glue into slime. If she’s passionate about making something that is actually helping her love and understand science, I’m going to be behind it. 

So we dug out the original slime recipe that uses borax and they got to work.

But we didn’t stop there. No. We decided to also try out borax free slime recipes, mainly a recipe for slime that uses saline or contact solution instead of borax. 

I’m going to share that contact solution based slime recipe with you today but I’m also going to give you a few thoughts and let you know what happened with our experience. Make sure you read all the way to the end. 

First the slime recipe:

Borax Free Slime – Making Slime with Contact Lens Solution

To make borax free slime using saline, you will need:

• 1/2 cup clear glue
• 1/2 cup warm water
• 1/2 tablespoon of baking soda
• 4-6 tablespoons of saline or contact lens solution

Start by pouring your glue into a bowl. 

Dissolve 1/2 tablespoon baking soda into 1/2 cup warm water and stir well.

Once the baking soda is fully dissolved, add the water mix to the glue and stir well. 

Now it’s time to activate the slime with the saline. 

This is the tricky part. When you make slime with borax, the slime comes together pretty quickly once you add the activator. When we made the slime using the contact lens solution, it was an extremely slow process and we kept having to add more and more saline until it pulled together. 

Start with adding 2 tablespoons of contact lens solution (or saline) to the glue and water mix. Stir well. If it starts to pull away from the edges of the bowl, you can add more saline to your hands and start to knead the slime, adding more contact lens solution to your hands as needed. 

If you’ve added 2 tablespoons of the contact lens solution to your mix and stirred well but it’s not coming together, you need to add more.

Here’s the dilemma.   We made this recipe several times and each time we wound up adding about 4 tablespoons of the solution to get a nice slime consistency.  It works great for the first day. The problem is that the longer the slime sits, the more it continues to activate and 24 hours later the slime was thick and had lost a lot of it’s stretch.

So what do you do?  If you want a borax free slime, this is still a good option. However , don’t expect it to last for days like borax slime. You can still have a lot of fun with this slime. In fact, since you know it’s not going to last a long time, use it with items that you think you might ruin other slime with such as baking sprinkles. 

In fact, we added these fun sprinkles that I found at Walmart. You might remember how I used them to make this fun pink popcorn for movie night .

I was glad I didn’t put them into one of my kid’s favorite slimes because the color instantly started bleeding BUT they wound up loving how it turned out. 

May I introduce you to Unicorn Puke Slime. Or maybe we’ll call it Unicorn Snot Slime.  The yellow came off of the gold stars and combined with the other sprinkles, it’s just fun and kinda amazing. 

The other sprinkles are also going to bleed , so this isn’t a slime that would have a long shelf life but that’s OK because tomorrow it’s going to be a little harder to play with. 

One more thing….

I lied. Actually it’s two more things.

First of all, we made this recipe with clear glue so we would get crystal clear slime. Well, when you make crystal clear slime and give it to kids to play with on dirty surfaces ( You thought my house was clean? That’s funny .) with dirty hands, it doesn’t stay clear.

The second thing is actually kind of important.  Yes this slime recipe is borax free however contact solution / saline and borax both contain sodium borate, which can cause reactions on skin.  A solution made to go in your eye will be safer than a solution that’s made to help with laundry but it can still cause irritation to delicate skin. 

The best thing is to always wash hands after making slime and make sure you clean under any jewelry, such as rings where the slime solutions might be hiding out. 

So what do you think? Are you going to stick with slime made with borax or are you going to try the borax free slime recipe?

The post Borax Free Slime? Making Slime with Contact Lens Solution appeared first on Clumsy Crafter .