Marble: beautiful, and it will change
Marble is mostly calcite, which reacts with acid. Lemon juice, wine, vinegar, and tomato sauce leave dull etch marks, and sealing helps with stains but not with etching. A honed finish hides etching much better than a polished one.
If you love the way an old Italian kitchen counter looks after years of use, marble is wonderful. If every mark will bother you, it probably isn’t the right stone for the island.
Quartzite, and the slabs that aren’t
True quartzite is metamorphosed sandstone. It’s hard, around 7 on the Mohs scale, handles heat well, and doesn’t etch. It’s still porous, so it needs sealing from time to time.
The catch is that some slabs sold as quartzite are really marble or dolomite, which will etch. Before you commit, test a sample at home: a drop of lemon juice left for a few minutes, and a light scratch with a steel key. Real quartzite won’t react to either.
Engineered quartz and the silica question
Engineered quartz is roughly 90 to 95 percent ground quartz bound in resin. It’s nonporous and very consistent, though the resin can discolor under sustained heat, so trivets are a must.
Cutting it also releases crystalline silica, and California has seen serious silicosis cases among fabrication workers. Cal/OSHA’s emergency standard for high-silica stone became permanent in February 2025, and in May 2026 the state’s Standards Board voted to start the process of banning the fabrication and installation of artificial stone with more than 1 percent crystalline silica. That ban isn’t in effect yet, but it’s worth asking about low-silica products and how your fabricator works.
How we usually decide
We start with how you actually cook and who uses the kitchen, then bring samples home so you can live with them for a few days. Slabs are chosen in person at the stone yard, and we lay out seams and vein direction before anything is cut, so the finished counter looks like it was planned, because it was.
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