Glacier
Amaco Celadon
A celadon thin enough to read as colored glass, which is the clearest demonstration of what translucency buys you.
The glazes you can see through, and the ones that go halfway. Both change what the clay underneath is doing.
Opacity is the quietest decision on the glaze shelf and one of the most consequential. An opaque glaze replaces the surface of your pot. A translucent one sits over it like colored glass, so the clay body, the throwing rings, the carving and anything you painted underneath all keep showing.
That makes translucency the property to check first if you have done anything to the surface worth keeping. It is also why a translucent glaze looks completely different on a white body than on a dark one, while an opaque glaze barely notices.
We record three states rather than two. Translucent means you can see through it. Semi-translucent means it veils rather than hides, which is often the more useful of the two on a pot with subtle texture. Both are on this page, in that order.
One warning worth having. Translucent glazes show everything, including the things you would rather they did not: a fingerprint in the clay, an uneven wipe, a patch where the glaze went on thicker than the rest.
175 is a lot to look at. If you want three, these are the three.
Amaco Celadon
A celadon thin enough to read as colored glass, which is the clearest demonstration of what translucency buys you.
The Clay Hole Dipping Glazes
Our own clear dipping glaze, and the extreme end of the scale. No color at all, so everything underneath is the finished pot.
Amaco Kiln Ice
Translucent with something happening inside it, which is the version most people are actually looking for.
Fully translucent. The clay, the throwing rings and anything painted underneath all stay part of the finished pot.
Semi-translucent. These veil what is underneath rather than hiding it, which is often the more useful of the two over subtle texture.

Translucency is a trade. Everything you did to the clay stays visible, which is wonderful when you carved something and unforgiving when you left a fingerprint, a wire mark or a patch where you wiped the slip unevenly.
The practical consequence is that a translucent glaze asks you to finish the pot before you glaze it. Sponge the surface, look at it in raking light, and fix what you find. An opaque glaze forgives all of that. This shelf does not, which is exactly why the good pots look so good.

The same translucent glaze over a white stoneware and a dark iron body is not the same glaze. Over white you get the color at full strength; over dark you get a deeper, muddier, often more interesting version of it, and a celadon in particular will go noticeably warmer.
If you have not tried the same glaze on two bodies, that is one of the cheapest experiments available to you and it will change how you plan pieces.

This is the combination most people are eventually looking for and it is worth stating plainly. Underglaze holds the drawing; a translucent or clear glaze over the top makes it food safe, deepens the color and adds the gloss.
A tinted translucent instead of a plain clear puts an atmosphere over the whole drawing, like looking at it through colored glass. It is a five-minute decision that changes the entire character of a piece.
Translucent lets the surface underneath read clearly. Semi-translucent veils it without hiding it.
No, and that is the point. The body underneath is part of the finished color.
Yes. That is one of the main reasons to reach for one.
Yes. Everything under the glaze stays visible, including the parts you would rather hide.
A clear glaze is the extreme end of the same scale, with no colorant at all.
Thickness. Almost any translucent glaze goes cloudy if you put enough of it on.
If the clay is doing something worth seeing, this is the page. If the clay is doing something you would rather cover up, it is not.
We have done our best to represent every glaze here accurately, and you should still expect your pot to look different from what is on this screen.
Our glaze tile images are digitally created. They are built to show the character of a glaze, not to be a color match.
A screen is not a printout, a printout is not a test tile, and a test tile is not a finished pot. Each step in that chain shifts what a glaze looks like, sometimes a lot.
On top of that, the pottery itself changes the result: the clay body, how thick the glaze went on, whether it was brushed, dipped or sprayed, what was layered under or over it, where the piece sat in the kiln, how hot that spot ran, how fast it cooled, what was fired next to it, and how much texture the surface had. Two pots glazed from the same jar on the same day can come out different.
Treat every image here as a starting point, and treat a test tile fired on your own clay as the real answer.