Ceramic tableware is used in every home, whether you buy it in a supermarket or a luxury shop. What kind of ceramics are good ceramics? What kind of ceramics are free from safety hazards? I hope this article can give you some advice.

To sum up, there are three steps to selecting ceramics: touch the bottom of the tableware, shine a light on it and scratch it with a knife.

Touch the bottom of the tableware

Don’t buy tableware straight away when you see a plate that looks good. The market is now flooded with products that look beautiful but are made of poor materials. Generally, ceramic tableware is fired on a kiln plate. So bottom of the ceramic is usually not glazed. It is because there is no glaze covering it that you can clearly see the materials used in the ceramic body. So, get a plate and turn it over first to see the colour of the bottom. A good porcelain should be snow white and fine, and smooth to the touch.

It is best not to buy such a plate. Where the rectangle is marked out you can see that the glaze is not completely covered. This is also one of the ceramic defects. It should also be avoided at all costs when buying.

Lighting

The second thing to do is to take out your phone, turn on the torch and look through the plate. Note that at this point, don’t believe the shop assistant who tells you that you see this through or whatever. At this point it’s not about whether it’s transparent or not, it’s about whether the part that transmits light is even and free of impurities. If you can see through the light there are obvious black spots of impurities, then do not buy. Good ceramics have a very uniform light transmission. The rest of the ceramic in the photo below is fine. However, when the light is transmitted there is a clear black spot inside. This is an indication that the ceramic body itself has inclusions.

Scratch with a knife

The purpose of scratching with a knife is to scratch the surface pattern, the normal ceramic surface decorative patterns are after high temperature firing up. If you scratch it with a hard object and it falls off, it means that the decoration process is not qualified. Daily use will fall off, not only unsightly, but you can imagine where the colour has gone.

The three steps above will in fact already help you to choose a good ceramic tableware.

Reference: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/23178556