In this lecture I’m trying to make glazes make sense—like, actually sense in your studio, not just as a list of cool names. I walk through what I think of as the “Big List” of glaze types and surface effects, and I keep pulling the conversation back to the same question: what specific chemical reaction is creating that look? If you can name the mechanism, you can troubleshoot it. If you can’t, you’re basically hoping your bucket of sludge behaves. We get into the iconic problem-children and obsessions—Copper Reds, Tomato Red, Floating Blue—and I frame them as predictable outcomes of chemistry plus firing conditions, not magic. The takeaway is that glaze categories aren’t just aesthetics; they’re clues about melt behavior, color development, phase separation, and how your kiln atmosphere and schedule push those reactions around. My goal is for you to leave with a mental map: when something fails, you can diagnose why it failed, and when you’re chasing an effect, you know what variables actually matter for your next firing.