How to Tell If Ceramics Are Actually Handmade

"Handmade" has become one of those words that can mean almost anything. It sits on a sticker next to a barcode. It appears in product copy for things stamped out by the thousand from a single mould. Buying online makes this worse, not better - you cannot turn the piece over in your hands before you decide, so you are trusting a word that has been stretched thin by overuse.

There are, fortunately, physical signs that survive the trip from workshop to photograph to doorstep. None of them require expertise. All of them require looking closely.

Start with the base. A piece thrown on a wheel and trimmed by hand will usually show it - a slightly rough underside, faint trimming marks in a spiral, an uneven foot ring, sometimes a patch left unglazed where the piece sat during firing. A piece pulled from a mould tends toward the opposite: a base that is smooth, uniform, and finished the same way on every unit that came out of that mould. Neither is a moral failing. But only one of them is a hand at work.

Then there is the glaze. Glaze applied by hand behaves unpredictably once it goes into the kiln - it pools at the rim, thins where the heat passed through hardest, sometimes catches a pinhole or a small run down the side. The potters of Tamegroute, in Morocco's Draa Valley, still fire in wood-burning kilns loaded by hand, and their copper-and-manganese glaze pools and drips exactly this way - no two vessels finish quite alike. A sprayed or dipped industrial glaze, by contrast, is built for consistency: even coverage, no drips, no surprises, because surprises are what a factory is designed to remove.

If you can, compare two pieces of the same design side by side. This is the simplest test there is. Hand-built pieces vary - the curve sits slightly differently, the glaze pools in a different spot, the proportions shift by a few millimetres. Ceramica Bevilacqua, whose pieces we carry from their workshop in Campofranco, Sicily, will tell you plainly that no two of their pigne are identical, and they mean it as a fact about the process, not a marketing line. Machine-made pieces, whatever else they promise, promise sameness.

Finally, trust a small asymmetry over a perfect one. A rim that is very slightly oval rather than a true circle, a wall that is a shade thicker on one side, a handle that sits at a slightly different angle to its twin - these are not flaws to be forgiven. They are the record of a person's hands making a judgment call, over and over, that a machine was never asked to make.

Shop our ceramics, hand-built and hand-glazed, no two ever quite the same.