Rosa Garland: An ode to the magic of making slime

Fringe Magic

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Fringe Magic 〰️

Image: Corinne Cumming

It’s time for Edinburgh Fringe 2025, and with it, our annual feature series! This year, we’re celebrating the special, unique Fringe moments — the ones that feel like pure MAGIC


By Rosa Garland


“Better not to think about slime, which seems to carry the scent of our baser instincts, of sex and weakness, of sickness and death… Also, it’s really cool to use it for alternative clown comedy about queer sexual shame’ – academic Susanne Wedlich, in ‘Slime: A Natural History’*

*citation unverified for the last sentence.

I love slime. I think it’s magic. It’s full of meaning but is also just fun to play with. It’s innocent and childish, it’s terrifying and disgusting. It’s uncontainable, it’s sexy, it’s stupid, it’s completely inconvenient. Aspirational, tbh.

Seeing as I’ll be making slime every day in Edinburgh for my show, I thought I should practice getting my ratios right. So, come with me while I embark on the magical journey of making slime.

ONE: ‘Raw’ materials

I use the good stuff from messysupplies.com, who proudly proclaim on their homepage that they have supplied gunge to Children in Need, CBBC, ITV and the RSC. Also, me. (I’m not on the website yet, but I’m sure I will be). It comes as a powder.

The thing is, we’re all pretty good at making slime already, even without messysupplies.com. My vagina, for one, does it every single day and I don’t even think about it and it doesn’t even cost £5.99 per bag. 

I wanted bright orange slime, though. I wanted a colour that didn’t have any immediate cultural or bodily connotations, and that would seem artificial and a bit confusing on stage. Unreadable.

TWO: Just Add Water

To test the ratio, I tried 50ml of slime powder with 600ml tepid (yes, it has to be tepid) water. Hands are the best stirring implements. It thickens in a few minutes. 

THREE: Brain-poo-slime 

OK, so this was way too thick. But god it felt good. Like touching an alien brain or a worm body.

In queer culture and art, we’re often drawn to slimy parts of nature culturally marked as abject or gross: snails, slugs, worms, mud, mushrooms, generally all the “weird little guys”. If you treat us as gross and monstrous we’ll just embrace it and throw it back at you, and what we make will be beautiful and might make you retch. So yeah.

I have to drop a reference here to one of my favourite shows ever, which I only saw a few weeks ago: 50 Ways to Kill a Slug, by Dre Spisto and Joana Nastari. With their translucent slugslime, they embark on a mind-blowingly tender exploration of queerness and rest and capitalism and a million other things. Do not miss it if it tours near you.

FOUR: Watery discharge 

Attempt 2: 50ml powder, 2400ml water. Result: too thin for the show, but beautiful to drizzle.

Slime is often a symbol of the scary, uncontrollable other – it’s almost as if we’re culturally disgusted by our own messy bodily functions, and particularly AFAB bodily functions, in the same way. Strange. One of the inspirations for Primal Bog is the ‘50s horror movie The Blob, about a huge blob of slime that fucks with a small town and makes Steve McQueen piss his pants. It’s coming! We’re all doomed! Run, don’t walk! SEXUALITY! COMMUNISM! 

FIVE: Lumpy beans 

So, I couldn’t resist combining the too-thick and the too-thin gunges to make this delightful cocktail. Sometimes you just gotta find out.

Brightly coloured gunge is familiar to lots of us millennials/zillennials from childhood because we all saw celebrities getting gunged on Nickelodeon. The garish grossness is childish, but so indulgent and so fun. Under the waterfall of ooze, celebrity sex symbols are reduced to sloppy messes (see below). It’s kind of a beautiful equaliser. 

Image: Getty Images

SIX: Goldilocks goo 

For the final attempt, I used 50ml powder and 1200ml water. Result: pretty much perfect texture for the show. A smooth and slow drop onto the head. Lovely. 

I have to pay homage to wet and messy fetishism. It’s a broad church, but basically people get themselves covered in slimy substances specifically for sex and I seriously respect it. It’s a porn genre, and of course as part of that, you find a lot of women getting gunged in a classic male-gazey way, but it doesn’t have to just be that. In the show, I’m hoping to allow slippage (as it were, etc) between the image of the naked woman in slime as pornographic, as an expression of agency, as an image of helplessness, and as a source of quite frankly great comedy.

I honestly could go on about slime all day. If you’ve made it this far, I’ll let you get back to your life now. But maybe next time your body makes a little bit of slime, you can be like, “hey man… that’s cool.”


Listen while you slime:


Rosa Garland: Primal Bog is at Assembly Roxy Downstairs from July 30th -August 24th (not 12). Tickets here

Follow Rosa on Instagram here


Read more about Edinburgh Fringe 2025:

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