YOU ARE FILLED WITH DETERMINATION //
✋foamy icee + dissolvable butterfly (you can mix it in!)
👃cherry rooibos tea, dried field grasses, sun-warmed honey, honeysuckle, roasted hazelnuts
🍵tea pairing: wild grown rooibos by davidstea, produced by Izak, a local small-scale farmer
*comes with 3 teaspoons of loose leaf tea in an opaque resealable bag to keep it fresh -- makes roughly 2-3 cups of tea)
DO NOT ADD TEA TO SLIME
Rooibos, or “red bush” in Afrikaans, is a plant native to South Africa’s Cederberg region, thriving in sandy, nutrient-poor soils and enduring drought -- a symbol of resilience and abundance. First cultivated by the Indigenous Khoisan people, this sweet, red herbal tea was sustainably harvested in communal groups. Leaves and stems were carried down mountains on donkey back, chopped, bruised, and oxidized in the sun to develop their signature vibrant red color.
With notes of caramel and vanilla, rooibos is caffeine-free and rich in antioxidants, supporting digestion, cholesterol, blood sugar balance, and the immune system.
17th century Dutch colonizers observed the Khoisan peoples’ use of rooibos and adopted it as a local alternative to expensive black tea imported from Asia. In the early 20th century, it began to become more popular in other parts of the world after being marketed by Benjamin Ginsberg as “mountain tea”. But when rooibos became commercialized, the Khoisan were largely excluded from the profits and their traditional knowledge and practices were co-opted without acknowledgment. Rooibos cultivation shifted to large-scale farms controlled by colonizers, and the Khoisan became marginalized in their ancestral lands. In 2019, an agreement was reached, requiring South Africa's rooibos companies to pay a (small) percentage of the revenue from rooibos sales to Khoisan communities.
This slime features the fiery-orange Acraea Horta butterfly, found in diverse climates across southern and eastern Africa, as a symbol of rooibos’ resilience and transformative qualities. The larvae feed on wild peach and passionflowers, extracting cyanide from the plants which is carried with them into their adult stage and exuded as a defense mechanism against predators.
