The finishes, and what each one does
Matte leads here, then polished and glossy in close company, then honed, with split face, gauged, natural and anti-slip groups behind them.
A polished black holds a reflection and reads as jet. A honed black lifts to a flat charcoal, since a matte surface scatters light instead of returning it. A glossy glaze does something different again: the shine sits in a layer of glass above the color, so the reflection and the black look slightly separated. Three surfaces, one color, three results.
Black is not one color
The materials here reach black by different routes and land on different blacks. A slate is blue-black or green-black because of the minerals in it. A granite of the Absolute Black type is close to neutral. A glazed ceramic is the only one that can be made exactly even, since its color is a recipe.
A black marble such as the Nero family is black with white veining running through it, which is a different proposition altogether. Where two black surfaces have to meet in one room, this is the thing to check before ordering, and a sample beside a sample settles it faster than any description.
The materials in this range
Porcelain is the largest material, then marble, ceramic, glass, granite, slate and quartzite. That spread is unusual for a color page and it happens because black is one of the few colors every material can produce.
It also means the same nominal color sits on bodies with nothing else in common: a fired porcelain, a carbonate stone, an igneous stone, a metamorphic slate and a pane of glass all answer differently to everything except the eye.
Slate, ledger panels and the textured end
A substantial group here is slate and slate look, and a further group is ledger panel: a wall unit with a stacked, layered face supplied as a piece instead of as separate strips.
Black is the color that textured wall products are most often specified in, because relief needs shadow to read and a dark surface gives the deepest shadow available. A split face black panel is almost entirely made of shadow.
Why the shade variation runs low
Most of the pieces here that publish a variation rating sit at the low end of the scale, and that is a property of the color rather than of any particular product.
Black is a saturation limit. A pigment cannot be made blacker than black, so batches converge on the same place instead of drifting apart the way a mid-tone beige or gray can. The variation that does show up on a black surface is in the finish rather than the color.
Formats, from mosaic to paver
12x12 and 12x24 lead the size list, then 24x48 and 24x24, with 4x12, 18x18, 6x12, 6x24, 3x6 and 6x6 behind them, and a 20 mm outdoor group at the thick end.
What is here goes from mosaic sheets through field tile to structural paving, which means a black can be carried from a shower pan to a terrace without leaving the color. Few colors are made across that whole span, and it is the practical reason black turns up in projects that want one surface treatment running through several rooms. The small formats are in black mosaic tile.
What a black surface does to a room
It absorbs light where a pale surface returns it, so it takes brightness out of a room and gives back definition instead. A black floor grounds a bright space and makes everything standing on it read as an object.
The same property is why black works so well as the smaller half of a pair. A black border, a black band, a black shower pan under white walls or the dark squares of a checkerboard all use black to draw an edge that a mid tone could not. It is the only color that can hold a line against anything else in the room, which is why it has outlasted every fashion that arrived alongside it.
Where the narrower black pages are
Black porcelain tile is the fired range, Absolute Black granite the solid stone, and black ceramic tile the glazed one.
Black and white tile is the pairing, and black kitchen floor tile the room.
