Like Goldie, some children have turned slime into a business.

There’s a thriving nationwide market for slime, and the demand is met by children aged 8 to 12, teenagers and young adults, who sell it at school or online, often through Etsy. Many post marketing videos on Instagram, where they can be seen poking, swirling and squishing globs of it. The hashtag #slime appears on 3.5 million Instagram posts, and slime searches on Etsy have increased 9,000 percent since October, according to the company.

YouTube is brimming with video tutorials, or “slime D.I.Y.s.” The most popular garner millions of views and attract lucrative advertising and sponsorship deals for their creators.

Although Nickelodeon’s parent company, Viacom, owns trademarks on a plethora of slime-related products, including “free-flowing gel,” clothing and books, the term slime is widely used among home producers, and Viacom typically doesn’t enforce its rights against them.

The standard slime ingredients are white school glue and the household cleaning detergent known as Borax, or sodium borate. To jazz up the color, scent and texture, slime-makers add glitter, food coloring, essential oils, baby oil, cornstarch and shaving cream.

Complaints about shortages of Elmer’s are rippling through the slime community, and the company confirms that sales of its white school glue and glitter glue have been rising since the middle of last year. In December, sales more than doubled. In response to the craze, Elmer’s now posts slime recipes on its own website, as does the arts and crafts store Michaels.