Pottery Boy and the TikTok pottery trend - YOU Magazine Fashion Beauty Celebrity Health Life Relationships Horoscopes Food Interiors Travel Sign in Welcome!Log into your account Forgot your password? Password recovery Recover your password Search Sign in Welcome! Log into your account Forgot your password? Get help Password recovery Recover your password A password will be e-mailed to you. YOU Magazine Fashion Beauty Celebrity Health Life Relationships Horoscopes Food Interiors Travel Home Life This £45 mug sold out in 40 seconds By Maddy Fletcher - September 11, 2022 So what’s all the hype? Thanks to social media, a host of Hollywood stars and TV favourite The Great Pottery Throw Down, the nation has gone potty for ceramics. Maddy Fletcher investigates. There’s a section on TikTok called the For You feed. It delivers videos ‘likely to be of interest to that user’. In other words, an algorithm monitors your tastes and sends you a continuous stream of videos it thinks you will like. My feed looks a little like this: video of a dog doing a handstand; video of an argument on Love Island; video of an attractive 20-something making a clay pot. I don’t know how or why the algorithm decided that people making pottery was ‘for me’, but it has – and it was correct. What’s more, by the looks of it, I am not the only one who’s now potty for pots. TikTok clips tagged #pottery have racked up over 7.3 billion views. There are dozens of dungaree-clad women crafting ceramics, but it’s the sexy (often shirtless) pottery men who pop up on my page. One of them is Guy Vadas, 25, from Melbourne. Known as Pottery Boy, he has over 935,000 followers. In one clip, he can be seen heartily slapping a lump of clay before moulding it into a spiral plant pot. It has 48 million views, 6.6 million likes, and 73,500 comments. ‘How do I become clay?’ comments one admirer. @potteryboy Just making a funky bowl, I really enjoyed this process. V satisfying #pottery #potteryboy #onlypots original sound – nyvirtuoso I ask him if he thinks his boy-band good looks might have something to do with his popularity. ‘I’d be a little delusional if I didn’t think that was a factor,’ he replies. Ceramics have always exuded sexiness. Think Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze straddling a pottery wheel together in the 1990 film Ghost. But there’s more going on here than sex appeal. On Pottery Boy’s videos, one of the less lusty comments reads, ‘This is so relaxing to watch.’ Another says, ‘Anxiety gone.’ Clearly, watching people crafting lumps of clay into crockery calms down nervy Gen Zs. And it’s not just young people – Britain as a whole has fallen in love with pottery. Stylish studios are popping up where you can ‘throw clay’ and drink wine ‒ ‘plonk and pottery’ as one venue in North London calls it. Oxford Ceramics Fair has reported record attendances. And, according to Hobbycraft, in the past three months searches for ‘air drying clay’ and ‘clay tools’ have risen by 150 per cent and 223 per cent respectively. Maybe it’s something to do with the cohort of celebrities who are ceramics geeks. Serena Williams, 40, has posted an Instagram selfie of her astride a wheel captioned, ‘I’m really getting into pottery.’ Last year, Hollywood star Seth Rogen started flogging his pottery designs for £72 a pop, prompting the Vogue headline, ‘Seth Rogen’s Ceramics TikTok Is So Weirdly Hot To Me’. Then there’s Brad Pitt. After his split from Angelina Jolie in 2016 he spent up to 15 hours a day at British sculptor Thomas Houseago’s studio in Los Angeles working with clay. The actor, 58, now has a ceramics space at home and Leonardo DiCaprio pops round to eat sandwiches and make pots. Pitt is also a fan of Channel 4’s The Great Pottery Throw Down having ‘seen every season’. He told reporters last month: ‘I tear up a little.’ He is not alone. In March, more than two million Brits tuned in to watch the finale of the TV ceramics competition and, like Pitt, fans love the show because it’s gentle and emotional. Keith Brymer Jones, one of the judges, is known for crying whenever a contestant creates a good pot. (A YouTube video titled ‘Every time Keith Brymer Jones cries on The Great Pottery Throw Down Series 4’ runs to almost seven minutes long.) Soppy or not, Throw Down (which is available to watch on All 4, with a new series planned for next year) has meant big business for ceramicists. Florian Gadsby, 29, from London, appeared as a guest judge in January 2022. ‘In the hour that I was on live television I gained 10,000 followers on Instagram,’ he says. ‘It’s pretty wild.’ Gadsby, like many potters, relies on Instagram for business. Several times a year he’ll announce his ‘shop drops’ with everything selling out within minutes. The £45 mugs (below) are the most popular. At Gadsby’s last drop all 120 went within 40 seconds. ‘They’re like Glastonbury tickets.’ Maxine Leslau, 59, is the same. She got into pottery after her three sons left home. She had a studio at her home in the Cotswolds and a shop in London’s Primrose Hill. But it wasn’t until she joined Instagram that business really took off. ‘I was in lockdown with my sons and they introduced me to it.’ Soon she was selling her work across the world. ‘I haven’t had a full-time career until now,’ she says. ‘I’m going to be 60 next January. A lot of women think it’s the end of their lives. I’m here to say it’s the beginning.’ In fact, she says, if there was one benefit to lockdown it was that lots of people rediscovered creativity – and maybe that’s what’s behind this current pottery boom. ‘People were trapped and lonely,’ says Leslau. ‘But they found that, “If I sew these handkerchiefs together, or bake this cake, then I’m a maker.” And it feels so good.’ Pottery – messy, physical, almost childish – is ‘good for your brain’ says Leslau. ‘I want everyone to go out and buy a piece of clay.’ Fancy an even better hobby If pottery already feels a bit mainstream to you, why not try glassblowing instead? There’s a burgeoning scene in the UK, with one course near Birmingham promising that, for £320, attendees of the class will ‘start as a beginner and leave a glass-making addict’. The hype has been helped by Netflix’s Blown Away, a reality TV show about a glass-blowing competition held in Canada. The show started in 2019, but it became a hit in lockdown – mostly because it’s escapist and completely mad. In previous episodes, contestants have had to create glass robots, socks and olives. A warning to wannabe blowers: it’s hot work. Furnaces run at around 1,300C. While filming season one, Netflix had underestimated the heat on set and had to shut down production because the camera crew kept fainting. Filming restarted three days later, but only once the team had cut plenty of holes into the building’s roof. 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