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 three things — Porcelain on thirty-nine, Ceramic on sixteen and Marble on five. The word Rectified appears on one product page. The Finish line says matt, gloss, honed, polished or rough, and on some tiles it names two faces rather than one; the one fluted tile records its fluting in a separate Profile row. 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 and updated on 1 October 2026 from supplier documentation, the rows fall into three groups.

• Porcelain — thirty-nine tiles: the fourteen Pietra marble-look 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.

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 marble-look tiles show that rule from the other side: their Material row read Not specified until it was updated on 1 October 2026 from supplier documentation, and it now reads Porcelain because the supplier documentation states it, not because of the look name.

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.

Both fired-body groups are also listed as collections, porcelain tiles (thirty-nine) and ceramic tiles (sixteen), so a material can be compared across its whole group before a product page is opened.

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. How to tell if a tile is rectified puts that check in order: the page first, then the piece, then the supplier documentation.

Matt, gloss, honed, polished and the rest

The Finish line records the face. The wordings here are not uniform and several tiles list two faces; the twelve 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 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 — a face with a high shine that returns highlights and reflections. On a stone sheet the shine is ground and buffed out of the stone itself; on a porcelain tile the pages here do not say how the shine was produced.
• Soft polished — a trade term for a face polished only in part, so patches of shine sit against duller patches and the lustre is gentle and uneven rather than a full mirror. Other shops sell a face like this as lappato, an Italian trade word. None of the sixty tiles here records soft polished now (updated 4 October 2026, from the supplier's current documentation).
• Honed — ground flat and left there, without the buffing step. Smooth to the hand, low in shine. What is a honed finish? sets out where the word comes from and how honed, polished and matt faces handle light.
• Texture and rough — a deliberately uneven face, moulded to carry the grain or grit of the surface depicted.
• Fluted — a face shaped into parallel vertical lines, so the surface itself is three-dimensional. One tile here records it, in a Profile row rather than on the Finish line.

Two consequences follow. The first is colour. The same body and the same print can read differently in gloss and in matt, because a shiny face returns part of the room's light straight back at you while a matt face scatters it. A review of gloss research by Šarić and Sole names colour, gloss, texture and translucency as the four main appearance attributes of a surface, and places gloss next after colour in how people read a surface. We cite the review for that ranking only; checking a colour on a sample in the face you will order is our advice, not the review's.

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. On a matt face, the matt collection page says, marks "generally read less than they do on a glazed face"; what shows instead is not recorded here. Neither face is the clean one; what a tiled surface asks you to clean gathers what the pages here do say about each.

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 offers two faces as alternatives, such as honed or polished, the word alone does not pick one: since 5 October 2026 you choose between them on the product page, and can order a sample of that face first.

The words in one table

Size is a separate set of rows again. Tile sizes in Australia puts the fourteen recorded face and sheet sizes in one row and works out what each holds per square metre.

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 part of it as a fairly clean reflection, with the image of whatever sits opposite; matt scatters it, so the face reads even from most angles. The print underneath can be identical and the two faces still read differently, so compare colour on a sample in the face you will order.

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.

Is any tile here lappato?

Not by that name. None of the sixty Finish lines here reads lappato, and no page says how its face was polished, so the pages cannot tell you whether a face here is what another shop would sell as lappato. Soft polished, the nearest wording, is no longer on any of the sixty either: on 4 October 2026 the supplier's current documentation recorded those faces as honed or polished. Where a Finish line offers two faces as alternatives, such as "Honed or polished", the product page has let you choose between them since 5 October 2026; the two Atlas tiles' "Texture and honed" describes one face and is not a choice.

What is the difference between honed and polished?

On stone, both start with grinding the face flat: honed stops there, so the face is smooth and low in shine, and polished goes on to buff it to a shine. On the porcelain tiles here the pages do not say how either face was made; the difference they record is the shine. In the Finish line, three tiles here read Honed alone (Pietra Perla and the Carrara Round and Fan mosaics), two read Texture and honed (Atlas Frost and Atlas Ivory) and six read Honed or polished (the Pietra tiles from Latte to Neve); the second finish row on each page, labelled Finishing, shows Honed on the first five, and on the six, since 5 October 2026, whichever of Honed and Polished you choose. Polished stands alone in three Finish lines, all natural marble mosaics: Carrara Large Hexagon, Stack and Petite Herringbone, and their Finishing row reads Polished. It is also one of two faces named on eleven Pietra tiles, Honed or polished on six and Polished or matt on five, and on those eleven the product page offers the two faces as a choice, with the Finishing row showing the one chosen.

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. The Material row was updated on 1 October 2026 from supplier documentation: the fourteen Pietra tiles now record Porcelain. The Finish line was read again on 30 September 2026, and the fluted wording above was corrected to match it. 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. The two questions on lappato and on honed and polished were checked against all sixty pages again on 29 September 2026, and updated on 4 October 2026 from the supplier's current documentation, which changed the finish on eleven tiles; no tile here records soft polished now. The passages on choosing between two faces were updated on 5 October 2026, when the product page began offering that choice. The box coverage count in the table was updated on 2 October 2026 from supplier documentation, and the mosaic entry on 4 October 2026.

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.

References

Šarić, D. and Sole, A. S. (2024). Visually Significant Dimensions and Parameters for Gloss. Journal of Imaging, 10(1), 10. doi.org/10.3390/jimaging10010010

The research paper cited here is open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

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

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