Odorless Yixing fake?

Hi all,

Here’s a quick question regarding Yixing. (Really? Does such a thing exist?)

I had decided to buy an additional pot from a second-hand website. Now upon arrival I found I immediately had learned a few lessons. Workmanship is not so spectacular, clay colour is much more brown than on photographs, etc. OK, fine.

After breaking it in, another thing struck me. This pot has no smell.

Normally on the Web you’ll read that (off) smells are a sign of fakery, however my other two pots (one of which I hold in high regard) both smell significantly of ‘pottery shop’, or wet clay. It’s a beautiful smell that I now think of as ‘authentic’ for yixing ware.

The new pot, no smell at all really. I think it is some kind of terra cotta with a few grains of glitter mixed in, for the tourist market maybe. A decent job as such (the clay imitation). It also holds (and radiates) the heat quite well, and the tea doesn’t come out bad as such.

So two things worry me: 1) is my judgement right that you can smell a real yixing, and that it’s a pottery shop / clay smell (before at some point the tea takes over)? 2) the usual about whether the fake is in any way safe to use, because I originally wanted something ‘cheap’ for work.

If my intuition is right (and I think it is), I don’t think I’ll actually use this pot after all, other than as an all-in-one demo model for what not to buy, for which it serves excellently! But I’m curious if any people have decided to use such a pot, knowing its deficiencies, for its own limited merits (like staying nicely hot).