Relive your ’90s Childhood & Clean at the Same Time with Cleaning Slime

Bring back the glory days of your 1990s childhood in one fell swoop with this effective—but also really, really fun—way to clean. It starts with a few handy household ingredients, which become mixed into a substance similar to Nickelodeon Gak (remember that stuff?). You can use the resulting goop to reach crumbs in hard-to-clean crevices all around your home (plus your office and your car).

All you’ll need to make this magic cleaning goop is four ingredients—water, glue, borax and food coloring—and you might already have them all at home. The video above from Sea Lemon can show you how it’s done, but if you’ve ever stirred a box of cake mix together, I promise you’ve already got the right skills.

If you’d rather not use borax, you can get a similar result with liquid starch. And if you don’t want to DIY at all? You can buy manufactured cleaning slime online.

Now that you’ve got the goop, the possibilities for using it are endless.

In the process of making slime from scratch, you no doubt noticed its, uh… tack. The stuff is super sticky. You can press a glob of it against the cracks and crevices around your home (anywhere a vacuum won’t reach) to pick up dust, lint or wayward crumbs.

Here are a few places to try:

• Your computer keyboard or laptop
• Inside your car, on the dashboard or center console
• Between the buttons of your remote controls
• Between the blades of fans and air vents
• Around dials (like your toaster or oven knobs)
• Around light switches
• All over your cell phone
• Between the vents in your electronics (like on your cable box or game console)
• In the perforated holes of a metal speaker
• Inside your earbuds

And yes, eventually your slime will get gunked up. But when it’s finally filthy, you can just toss it out and mix up some more—to play with and to keep cleaning.