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Of all the things that come to mind when cleaning a keyboard, slime is not one that immediately surfaces for me. And it certainly would not be one I would register high on my list of cleaning agents worth trying. The idea of taking a sticky, gelatinous glob and smashing it into my beloved Keychron Q1 Pro borders on sacrilege for me. After all, you wouldn’t clean a Ferrari with a car wash brush, would you? Perhaps I’m being a bit dramatic, as I have it on good authority that this is supposed to work, and I’m nothing if not humble. So, I’m doing it for science – I’m doing it for you, dear readers.

Keyboard cleaning slimes – better known as cleaning gels – are a pliable, putty-like substance intended to grab any loose dust, dirt, or hair trapped in your keyboard. The gel effectively molds into the spaces around the keys, absorbing debris sitting at the bottom. Some find this method preferable to compressed air or electronic dusters. Compressed air is inherently wasteful and doesn’t go very far, and can often just blow debris into different parts of the keyboard, like underneath the key stems. Electric air dusters can be a good investment, but that depends on if you want to spend the money to buy a good one.

The slime I’m looking at here is the most popular choice on Amazon, which is the ColorCoral Cleaning Gel. It has a solid price history of being between $6.99 and $7.99 for a 160 gram container, and has a 4.1 rating spanning 57,000 reviews. While the company doesn’t mention the ingredients in the product listing, it does claim it’s non-toxic and biodegradable. So, let’s clean a keyboard with slime and see if it’s a good idea.

According to the directions, the first thing to do is to make sure your hands are clean before removing any slime from the container. It’s probably also a good idea to make sure your keyboard is unplugged or disconnected, or that your computer is off. After this point, the directions are straightforward: remove the gel from the container, knead it into a ball, and press it into the area you want to clean.

Depending on the size of your keyboard, you could opt for using all the slime or just part of it. My Keychron Q1 Pro is a tenkeyless, 75% layout board, so I’m only using about half of the slime. I used a mixture of pressing the slime into the keyboard while also rolling it across the keyboard. Surprisingly enough, the slime doesn’t leave a greasy or sticky feeling behind, and it molds itself in between the keys fairly well. My keyboard is deep and my keycaps are a bit slanted and tall, so I had trouble getting the slime down to the bottom of the board. Though, it worked very well on my MacBook Air. It also worked well on my Razer Tartarus V2 keypad and on my desk mat.

The slime does work well on debris it can reach, but reach is the operative word here. Once I was done, I stuffed the slime back in its tub. According to ColorCoral, the slime can be used repeatedly, until it starts to get darker in color or becomes sticky, both of which indicate the slime needs to be thrown away and replaced. The slime can also be used to clean a number of other hard-to-reach surfaces, like the vents in a car or the grilles on fans and air purifiers.

While I can say the slime does work as intended, your mileage may vary depending on your keyboard, as I had a hard time getting the product to reach the bottom of my keyboard. The slime will also not remove fingerprints, smudges, or any oil residue from your skin. The slime does have an expiration date, which I assume is how long it will last with the packaging and seal unopened. Once opened, on the inside of the lid, there’s a warning about using it within three months.

For only a few dollars, this does make for a surprisingly easy way to clean a keyboard. You should be able to get several uses out of it before having to replace it, and it’s cheap enough that replacing it often isn’t cost prohibitive. Though, I wouldn’t skip the occasional deep cleaning of your mechanical keyboard, and would instead use this in between deep cleanings. For laptops, it is a good way to give the keyboard a once over, but there are also a number of other ways to clean a laptop keyboard.

I was initially skeptical of using slime on my keyboard, but I was pleasantly surprised by how versatile it is, and how it doesn’t leave your hands or surfaces feeling sticky or greasy. If you haven’t tried it, it’s worth the price of admission to give it a go. You might find yourself keeping some around.