Porcelain or ceramic, rectified or not, matt or gloss: what the words on a tile page mean, and which tiles here are which

Short answer: the Material row on the sixty tiles here says one of four things — Porcelain on twenty-five, Ceramic on sixteen, Marble on five and Not specified on fourteen. The word Rectified appears on one product page. The Finish line says matt, gloss, honed, soft polished, rough or fluted, and on some tiles it names two faces rather than one. This guide explains what each word means in ordinary use, then shows which tiles here carry which, so you can narrow a shortlist on a recorded fact rather than a photograph.

Porcelain and ceramic are both fired clay

Both start the same way. A clay-based mix is pressed into shape, usually glazed, and fired in a kiln. The difference the trade draws between them is density. A porcelain body uses a finer mix, pressed harder and fired hotter, so the fired body ends up with less open pore space in it. A ceramic body — in a tile shop the word is used for the ordinary, more porous wall-tile body — keeps more. That is why a porcelain tile feels heavier in the hand than a ceramic one of the same size, and why it is harder to cut.

The formal line between the two names is drawn by the tile standards, and it is drawn on water absorption: how much water a fired body takes up, as a proportion of its own weight. Those threshold figures live in the standards documents, not on a shop listing. No product page here publishes an absorption figure for any tile, so this guide does not quote one either. If your specification turns on absorption, that number has to come from the supplier documentation for the exact tile.

Neither word carries the look. Nothing in Porcelain says what the face has been figured to resemble, and nothing in a look name says what the body is. Two rows, two questions.

What the Material row says across the sixty tiles

Every product page here carries a Specifications panel with a Material row. Read across all sixty pages on 14 September 2026, the rows fall into four groups.

• Porcelain — twenty-five tiles: six stone-look (the three Atlas and the three Ridge tiles), six concrete-look (Quarry and Urban), five travertine-look (Coastal), five terrazzo-look (Haven), and three mosaic sheets, Carrara White Strip, Studio Graphite Strip and Studio White Finger.
• Ceramic — sixteen tiles: the eleven Studio subway tiles, the single 300 × 600 mm wall tile, and four mosaic sheets, Carrara Herringbone, Carrara Hexagon, Carrara Square and Studio White Herringbone.
• Marble — five tiles, all mosaic sheets: Carrara Round, Fan, Large Hexagon, Stack and Petite Herringbone, coded TK-MOS-006 to TK-MOS-010. These five are the only products here whose row records a quarried stone rather than a fired body.
• Not specified — fourteen tiles, and they are exactly the fourteen Pietra marble-look tiles.

The five tiles here that are actually stone sets those sheets out in full, and why a “-look” name never supplies a material on its own.

The fourteen blanks are that rule running the other way. Not specified on the fourteen marble-look tiles means the supplier documentation does not state a body and the page declines to guess one. It is not a hint. If the body matters to your specification, the blank is your prompt to ask the supplier before you order.

The naming catches people out in one place. Nine mosaic sheets carry the Carrara name and do not share a body: three read Ceramic, one Porcelain, five Marble. The range name describes the white-and-grey figuring, not what the tile is made of.

Rectified: one page here uses the word

Rectified describes what has been done to the edges after firing. Tiles shrink in the kiln by slightly different amounts, so a fired batch comes out a little uneven in size. On a rectified tile the edges are ground back afterwards to a square, exact dimension, which leaves the pieces near-identical and lets the tiler run a narrower grout joint that stays straight over a long run. A tile that has not been through that step keeps a slightly rounded, glazed edge — cushioned or pressed edge, in the trade — and wants a wider joint. Neither is a fault; they are two different edges giving two different-looking surfaces. A rectified tile in a fine joint reads as one continuous plane; a cushion edge reads as a grid of separate tiles.

Across all sixty product pages here, one records the word. Studio Pure White Wall Tile carries the line Edge: Rectified in its specification list and repeats it as a style tag. The other fifty-nine pages carry no edge line at all.

Say plainly what that means. Silence is not a statement that the other fifty-nine are unrectified, nor that they are. The page does not record it, so the honest reading is unknown. If joint width matters to your design, ask the supplier about the specific tile, or hold a sample: a crisp, unglazed, square-ground edge and a rounded glazed one are easy to tell apart in the hand.

Matt, gloss, honed, soft polished and the rest

The Finish line records the face. The wordings here are not uniform and several tiles list two faces; the thirteen ways this range writes a finish counts every wording and shows where the rows disagree. This guide will not repeat that count; it says what the words describe.

• Gloss — a glassy glaze. It reflects the room fairly sharply, throws light around, and shows whatever sits opposite it.
• Matt — a glaze with the shine taken out. Light scatters instead of returning as an image, so the face reads flat and even from most angles.
• Polished — ground and buffed to a shine mechanically rather than glazed to one; on a stone sheet the shine comes off the stone itself.
• Soft polished — polished only in part, so patches of shine sit against duller patches and the lustre is gentle and uneven rather than a full mirror.
• Honed — ground flat and left there, without the buffing step. Smooth to the hand, low in shine.
• Texture and rough — a deliberately uneven face, moulded to carry the grain or grit of the surface depicted.
• Fluted — a face formed into raised vertical ribs, so the surface itself is three-dimensional. One tile here records it.

Two consequences follow. The first is colour. The same body and the same print read lighter in gloss than in matt, because a shiny face returns more of the room's light straight back at you while a matt face scatters it. A colour chosen from a gloss sample looks deeper, and slightly greyer, in matt.

The second is marks. A gloss or polished face is a mirror, and a mirror shows fingerprints, smears and dried water spots plainly, because each breaks up an otherwise clean reflection. A matt or honed face hides those far better, but its finer surface holds dust and soap film in a way that reads as dullness rather than as spots. Neither face is the clean one; they show different things and ask for different habits — what a tiled surface asks you to clean gathers what the pages here say about that.

What a finish word will not tell you

A finish word describes an appearance. It does not tell you how a surface behaves underfoot. That sits in a separate row on the product page, kept apart from the finish line because the two are not the same question; on many tiles here that row reads Not specified, meaning nothing is recorded. Where a face is going to be walked on, the people to settle it are the tiler and the specifier responsible for the job. No word in a finish column settles it, and this guide does not try to.

Three smaller limits. A finish word does not tell you the body: gloss appears here on both ceramic and porcelain tiles. It does not tell you the edge, which is the rectified question above. And where a page lists two faces, it does not say which is being supplied — ask before you order.

The words in one table

Common questions

Is porcelain better than ceramic?

Better at what, is the honest reply. The Material row records a body; it does not rank bodies, and neither does this site. The denser body is harder to cut and heavier to lift, which matters to a tiler. Which one belongs in your job depends on the job and on the other rows — face size, thickness, edge, finish — for the two tiles you are choosing between.

Can I tell porcelain from ceramic by looking?

Not reliably from a photograph, and not always in the hand either. Weight at a given thickness, and the colour of a cut edge, are the clues a tiler goes by, and a glazed face can hide both. The listing row is the faster answer, and where it reads Not specified the answer is not on the page at all.

Why does the same tile look different in gloss and matt?

Because the two faces do different things with the light in the room. Gloss returns it as a fairly clean reflection, which lifts the apparent colour and adds the reflected image of everything around it; matt scatters it, which deepens the colour and keeps the surface even from every angle. The print underneath can be identical and the wall still read as two colours.

If a page does not say rectified, is the tile not rectified?

No. It means the page does not record the edge. One page here does; the rest say nothing either way, and unknown is the right thing to write in your notes. Ask the supplier about the tile you have shortlisted, or order a sample and look at the edge.

Where these numbers come from

All sixty product pages were read on 14 September 2026, and every count and wording above comes from that reading: the Material row and the Finish line in each Specifications panel, the product type, and a search of each page for the word rectified. Supplier documentation changes, so read the page for the tile you have chosen on the day you order. Nothing above says where a tile belongs in a particular room; confirm the specification your project needs with the responsible installer or specifier before the order goes in.

Next step — the rows these words sit next to, and the blanks between them. What to confirm before choosing goes through the whole panel; two white tiles that look the same applies the same reading to a shortlist of two.

Where this guide sits: Where to start sets out the order the guides follow.