Glazy.org is a glaze calculation and recipe sharing website created by Derek Au for hobbyist potters.
Glazy is a great piece of software and hats off to Derek for creating it, but there are fundamental issues with sharing glaze recipes.
There's almost no guarantee that a recipe from the internet will work. Tony Hansen has written on trafficking glaze recipes and while Glazy alleviates some issues, it does not fundamentally change the fact that ceramicists do not understand glazes.
What do I mean by that? The reality is that the hobbyist ceramics community - the people who actually use Glazy - are not involved in industry. People just do not have the knowledge and understanding of why glazes work. The result is people posting underfired glazes, glazes that leach poisonous metals into food, glazes that craze or shiver, etc. Especially since hobbyists seek visual effects over safety and practicality.
It's best to approach recipes on Glazy with a healthy dose of skepticism. As I've gotten serious about mixing my own glazes, I find myself using other people's recipes as a guide to developing my own versions.
Next, there's the issue of verification. Even if there's a glaze that looks good in the pictures and on paper, there's no guarantee that you'll be able to get the same thing. This is especially true for glazes that rely on sensitive mechanisms for visual effect.
Recipes are hard to verify because it takes a lot of time and energy to mix a recipe, test it, fire it, and then post the photo. As a result, most glazes only have pictures from the creator if you're lucky and likely no photo at all. Since materials, mixing, and firing vary from one place to the next, you might not get what you were promised.
The issue is that the vast majority of hobbyist potters don't care about the mechanics of glazes and just want something to work. At the same time, the state of the ceramics industry in North America mean that it's not possible to sustain many glaze chemists who understand the different mechanisms. It would be one thing if people were encouraged to post their testing process, but most of the time you just get a recipe out of thin air.
Ideally sharing a glaze recipe would involve sharing how it was created with detailed explanations of why and how it came to be. What issues happen when there's too much of this ingredient or too little of that? How do you correct the glaze if it isn't firing as expected? The recipe itself isn't the important part, it's the documentation that's valuable.
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