Why this guide exists and what you’ll learn about making modern gold lustre from real materials

This project grew out of roughly 2 years of experiments, wrong turns, small breakthroughs, and more solvent evaporation than my accountant would ever approve of. Everything you’re about to read comes from real bench work, repeated testing, and a fair amount of stubbornness.

Lustre chemistry has always felt oddly opaque. There’s plenty of advice on how to apply the stuff, very little on why it works, and even less on how to build it from the ground up.

This guide exists because I wanted to make a gold lustre using our own ethical, locally sourced Scottish gold. Working through the chemistry properly meant keeping careful notes and testing relentlessly, as you’d expect. What you’re reading here is a distilled version of that process, shared openly for anyone else with an interest in how these materials actually behave.

Alongside this written guide, I’ll be covering much of the same ground on video. These won’t be polished tutorials, but bench-level walkthroughs showing the real process, including what “fine” and “wrong” actually look like in practice.

The videos will be on our YouTube channel and will be linked here as they’re made over the coming months.

All I ask in return is something simple. If you find this useful, if it helps you understand lustres more deeply, or if it nudges you into developing your own formulations, please link back to this guide rather than lifting chunks of it elsewhere. That small bit of credit helps keep our tiny pottery visible and makes this kind of slow, experimental work sustainable.

No paywalls. No guarded recipes. Just hard-won understanding, passed on in good faith.