People Are Thirsty For TikTok’s Hottest Ceramicists

Blythe, for one, keeps his shirt on. He wants to be known for his art, rather than his torso. “It can be frustrating when I take an active effort to kind of fight that stereotype, and because of this environment that exists, you sometimes get lumped in with super overtly sexualized content,” he said. Still, the thirsty comments — “I’ve never been more interested in this man *I mean pottery*” and “he knows what he’s doing” — persist.

Some ceramicists are more willing to embrace the sensual side of their craft. “It’s quite a sexual, intimate thing — just the way it looks, I guess,” said Pottery Boy, a 25-year-old ceramicist from Melbourne, Australia, with 1.6 million followers on his TikTok account who has previously made international headlines for being “dreamy.” (Pottery Boy asked BuzzFeed News to withhold his name for privacy reasons.) “I suppose I’m a sexual person,” he said, “and I like the sexual element of lots of things in my life.”

Pottery Boy admitted his videos have horny undertones: He said he adds “extra mayo” — Australian slang for a bit of “spice” or “oomph” — to the slaps he gives the clay at the beginning of his videos, and he’s learned that making direct eye contact with the camera excites his viewers. At the same time, he doesn’t consider himself a thirst trapper. “No one ever says my videos are thirsty-trappy. They just say that they find them very attractive,” said Pottery Boy, who pumped a bare arm for the camera in a recent video as he lifted a particularly heavy lump of clay. “And I’m not shirtless,” he insisted. “I’m wearing an apron.”

Blythe’s comment sections, in comparison, are tame — although he does get some seriously horny private messages. “I get very strange emails, where it’s like, ‘Could you massage my socked feet?’ or something like that,’” Blythe recounted. “I don’t know if they thought the socked part made the outrageous request more normal, but something about that makes me laugh.”

Still, as 60% of Blythe’s viewers are women, he feels he has it easier than most of his female peers. “I think if you're a woman on the app that does pottery, you could probably get a lot of creepy messages,” he said. Monaco — who gets comments like “Nobody is looking at the pottery” and “We all know why we watch” — said she doesn’t “think it’s too bad.” She added, “Most of them are pretty funny.”