S2E1: The Colour on Your Mug

Season Two opens on the mug you reached for this morning — and the band of bright colour running round the outside, just below the lip. That band sits on the one part of a mug your mouth actually touches: the top two centimetres of the outer wall, where a lower lip rests, drink after drink. Colour like that has to be made from something, and at the hot end of the spectrum the something is usually cadmium, with lead in older work. It can get there two ways — sealed under a coat of clear glaze, shut behind a skin of glass, or fired on top of that skin afterwards. Nothing on the mug tells you which one you own. Our hosts walk the story the report tells, then go considerably further into the research it was distilled from: the European Commission's two purpose-made coffee cups and the five-hundred-fold gap between them; the twenty-millimetre drinking rim that appears identically in six standards across four decades with no one able to say where the figure came from; the German benchmark that the German authority itself calls "not a legal norm"; the metal at blue-decorated rims for which no limit exists anywhere; a sweep of 103 UK mug listings in which the words "under-glaze" and "on-glaze" appear exactly zero times; and the scientists who did measure the rim — and found metal there, almost all of it comfortably legal. Useful for listeners comparing mugs, ceramics, glazes, lead and cadmium in tableware, food-contact safety rules, and what a "lead-free" label actually promises. What you can do on Saturday: look at the twenty millimetres below the lip in the product photograph. A rim carrying no decoration has no coloured layer to give up; colour that runs under a glassy sheen is sealed behind the same barrier that keeps the coffee off the clay. And read "lead free" as the trade means it — a content ceiling, not an absence. The full report, with every source, is at youreanatural.com. Related episodes: The Bamboo Cup, The Permitted List