How we choose what goes on this site

1. Start from real search demand, not vendor pitches. We write about what people are actually asking, which is why there are pages here on things no brand wants discussed.
2. Confirm the product is currently sold before it goes on a list. A recommendation for a discontinued product is a waste of your time.
3. Read the manufacturer's published material composition — the specification, not the marketing page — and record it. If a brand does not publish what its cooking surface is made of, that is recorded too.
4. Look for a named third-party certification (GOTS, OEKO-TEX, NSF/ANSI, MADE SAFE, GREENGUARD Gold) and verify it against the certifier's own register where one is public.
5. Record what the product does not disclose. An absent disclosure is a finding, not a blank, and we print it.
6. Label every safety claim as one of exactly three things: third-party certified to a named standard; a manufacturer claim with no third-party certification published; or independently tested by a named third party, linked. There is no fourth option in our content model, which means an unlabelled claim cannot physically ship.
7. State the downside. Every pick on this site carries a "what you give up" line. A product whose trade-off we cannot name is a product we have not understood well enough to recommend.
8. Cite every source on the page and re-review on the schedule below, showing the date.

We do not test products in a lab, and we do not claim to have tested them in our own kitchen. We read specifications and certifications, and we show you both so you can check our work. Where someone else has done real testing — an independent lab, a certifier, a publication with a testing program — we cite them by name and link to them, and we never present their work as ours.

We also do not publish prices. Prices change daily and a stale number on a review page is worse than no number, so every pick links to the live listing instead. And we do not run a testimonials section, because we have no verified customer review data for this site and inventing some would be the single worst thing we could do to you.

Because "tested and reviewed" is close to universal in this category's page titles, and a reader who notices its absence here will reasonably wonder why. The answer is that we have not earned those words, and claiming them would be the easiest thing on this site to fake and the hardest for you to check.

The honest substitute is certification-checked: every pick is verified against its published material composition and its third-party certifications, with the sources on the page. That is a real and useful piece of work, and it happens to be the thing almost nobody in this market publishes.

• Commercial pages (roundups, comparisons, brand reviews) are re-checked when a product is discontinued, a formulation changes, or a cited source moves.
• Reference pages (materials, certifications) are re-checked when a standard changes — as happened when NSF P473 was folded into NSF/ANSI 53 and 58 in June 2021.
• Every page shows a last-reviewed date and the author. If that date is old, you are entitled to weight the page accordingly.
• Dead links are a defect. Links are checked as part of each review pass.

Glass & Cotton is an Amazon Associate. If you buy something after clicking a link here, we may earn a commission at no cost to you. That commission is the only revenue this site has.

It never changes a ranking. No brand pays for placement, no brand sees a page before publication, and where the cheaper or better-stocked option is the one that pays us less, it still goes first — because the alternative is a site nobody should read. The full statement is in the affiliate disclosure and the independence rules are in the editorial policy.

Email contact@glassandcotton.com with the page and the correction, and a source if you have one. If we are wrong, we change the page and say that we changed it.

This matters more on a site like this than on most. The whole proposition here is that our claims are checkable, which is worth nothing unless we act when somebody checks one and finds it wanting.