What Are Tiles Made Of?

Someone on a job in Parksville last spring pulled up a cracked 1970s floor tile and asked whether it was the same stuff as the porcelain going down next to it. It wasn’t, not even close. That question comes up on nearly every renovation Jordan Tile & Stone walks into: old tile out, new tile going in, and nobody’s ever actually explained what either one is made of. Four base materials cover almost everything sold today. Fired clay, quarried stone, melted glass, pressed cement. Each behaves differently underfoot, cuts differently on the wet saw, and holds up differently once grout and thinset are involved.

The Short Answer

Clay, stone, glass, cement: pick one and you’ve picked the tile’s whole personality. Ceramic and porcelain both start as clay fired in a kiln. Natural stone is cut straight from a quarry, no firing involved. Glass tile is melted and reformed. Cement tile is pigmented and pressed under heavy pressure, never fired at all. Everything else on a showroom floor, terrazzo, metal, pearl, mosaic blends, is one of these four dressed up or mixed together.

Ceramic Tile: What’s Actually In It

Ball clay does most of the work. It binds the mixture and holds its shape before firing, what the industry calls the “green body.” Feldspar gets added as a flux, melting at a lower temperature than the clay itself so everything bonds together in the kiln without cracking apart. Kaolin, a purer white clay, tightens up the strength and lightens the colour. Bentonite rounds it out in small amounts for workability. Fired around 1,000°C to 1,150°C, glazed on top, and it comes out of the kiln as the ceramic tile sitting in every big-box aisle in the country.

Cheap doesn’t mean bad here. Standard glazed ceramic still handles a kitchen backsplash or a low-traffic bathroom floor without complaint, and the price gap over porcelain pays for a lot of square footage on a budget reno. Where it struggles: exterior use, heavy foot traffic, and anywhere freeze-thaw cycling happens on an unheated porch. Coastal BC winters aren’t brutal, but they’re wet, and porous ceramic left outside eventually pays for that.

How Tile Actually Gets Made: Mixing to Firing

Powdered clay, feldspar, and other minerals get mixed with water into a workable paste first. From there the body gets pressed into shape, usually in a hydraulic press exerting several thousand pounds of force, then dried before it ever sees a flame. Green body is the trade term for a tile at that stage: shaped, but still fragile enough to crumble under a fingernail. Firing happens in a kiln running a controlled temperature curve, not a single blast of heat, climbing gradually so the tile doesn’t crack from thermal shock on the way up.

Glaze, if the tile gets one, goes on after the first firing or sometimes before, depending on the process. A second pass through the kiln melts that glaze into a hard, often glassy surface layer bonded to the clay body underneath. That’s the layer holding the colour and the sheen. Scratch through a glaze deep enough and the raw clay body underneath usually shows a different, duller colour, which is exactly how a chipped tile gets spotted from across the room.

Porcelain Tile: Same Family, Denser Mix

Porcelain starts with the same basic ingredients, just refined. Purer clay, more feldspar, finer sand, all fired hotter, often past 1,200°C, and pressed under far higher pressure before it goes in the kiln. That extra heat and density is the whole story. Water absorption drops under 0.5%, compared to 3% or more for standard ceramic, and that’s the number that actually predicts how a tile performs, not the glossy finish on top.

Through-body porcelain takes it a step further. Colour runs the full thickness of the tile instead of sitting in a surface glaze, so a chip or a worn corner barely shows. That’s the tile spec’d for a commercial entryway or a mudroom taking years of boots and dog claws, and it usually costs more per box for exactly that reason. Rectified edges, cut dead square after firing rather than left slightly rounded, are a porcelain-specific option too, and they’re what let an installer run a grout line down to 1/16 inch for that seamless, large-format look.

Is Floor Tile Ceramic or Porcelain?

Both, depending on the box. Floor-rated tile comes in either material, and the label matters more than the aisle it’s in. Porcelain gets specified for entryways, kitchens, anywhere wet or heavy-traffic. Ceramic still works fine for a guest bathroom or a low-traffic upstairs floor, provided it’s rated PEI 3 or higher for foot traffic. Check the box, not the assumption.

Natural Stone Tile: Quarried, Not Manufactured

Marble, granite, slate, travertine, limestone: none of these are made at all, in the manufacturing sense. Blocks come out of a quarry, get sawn into slabs, then cut down to tile format. No kiln, no recipe, just whatever minerals were compressed into that rock over a few million years.

That’s the appeal and the catch in one package. Granite is dense and close to bulletproof underfoot. Slate splits naturally into textured layers that never look manufactured. Travertine and limestone are softer, porous, and need sealing on a schedule most homeowners forget about after year two. Marble looks the best in almost every kitchen it’s installed in, and it’s also the one we field the most callbacks on, etched by lemon juice, dulled by vinegar-based cleaner, stained by a wine glass left overnight. Gorgeous, and genuinely more maintenance than most buyers expect walking into the showroom.

Thickness varies more with stone than any other category, too. A slab gets gauged, cut down to a consistent tile thickness, but the cut itself introduces natural variation a manufactured tile never has: veining that doesn’t repeat, colour that shifts slightly box to box. Buy stone tile for a full room in one order. A second order six months later from the same supplier can come from a different quarry lot entirely, and the mismatch shows the moment it’s laid next to the original run.

Glass, Cement, and the Specialty Tiles

Glass tile starts as recycled or raw glass, melted down and reformed into sheets or individual pieces, often backed with a reflective or coloured coating. It doesn’t absorb water at all, which makes it popular for shower niches and pools, but it shows thinset ridges and trowel lines through the surface if the installer isn’t careful. That’s an install problem more than a material one, and it’s why glass mosaic work costs more in labour even when the tile itself is mid-range.

Is Tile Made Out of Concrete?

Cement tile, yes, sometimes labelled concrete tile. Pigment gets mixed into cement, hydraulically pressed under several thousand pounds of pressure, and cured, never fired. That’s what gives it the chalky, matte look that’s had a resurgence in kitchens and entryways the last several years. It needs sealing before and after grouting, more than ceramic or porcelain ever will, and skipping that step is the single most common reason a cement tile floor stains within the first year.

Terrazzo splits the difference between manufactured and stone. Chips of marble, granite, or glass get suspended in a cement or epoxy base, poured or set as tile, then ground flat and polished. Reproduction terrazzo tile, sold new for kitchens and entryways chasing that mid-century look, uses the same idea at a fraction of the cost of a poured-in-place floor. Metal and pearl tile round out the specialty end: thin sheets of stainless steel, copper, or shell laminated onto a backing, used almost entirely as accent strips rather than full floors, since none of them handle sustained foot traffic well on their own.

What Old Floor Tiles Were Made Of

Pull up a floor from a Vancouver Island home built before the 1980s and a few materials show up on repeat. Clay quarry tile, thick, unglazed, and nearly indestructible, was standard in kitchens and mudrooms for decades. Terrazzo, marble or granite chips set in cement and polished smooth, shows up in older commercial buildings and the odd character home. And then there’s the one that stops every renovation cold: vinyl composite tile from the 1950s through the late ’70s, which often contained asbestos as a binder.

That’s not a scare tactic, it’s a real job-site call. If a demo turns up old 9×9 or 12×12 vinyl tile, or the black mastic underneath it, the right move is a sample tested before anyone starts cutting or sanding. Most testing labs on the Island turn results around in a few days, and it’s a small cost against the alternative.

Ceramic mosaic tile is the other repeat find, usually in mid-century bathrooms: small, unglazed, one-inch squares set on paper sheets, the same basic clay-fired process as any ceramic tile today, just smaller format and thinner grout lines. It’s tougher to remove cleanly than it looks, since decades-old thinset under mosaic tends to bond harder than anything a modern install uses.

Is Ceramic Tile Healthy?

Genuinely one of the better flooring choices going, on this front. Fired clay doesn’t off-gas the way vinyl or some laminate can, and a properly glazed surface doesn’t hold onto dust, pet dander, or mould the way carpet fibre does. The one thing worth checking on imported or older tile is glaze composition. Some older or lower-grade glazes used lead or cadmium in the colour pigments, mostly a concern with vintage or hand-painted decorative tile rather than anything currently sold through a mainstream Canadian supplier. New tile from a reputable source, nothing to worry about.

Grout is the part people forget to ask about. Standard cement-based grout is inert once cured, no ongoing off-gassing, though it’s porous enough to hold mould in a shower if it’s never sealed. Epoxy grout costs more and handles that moisture problem better, worth the upcharge in a steam shower or anywhere ventilation is weak. Either way, the tile itself was never really the concern. What’s underneath it, old mastic, old subfloor, sometimes matters more.

Why the Material Actually Matters on the Job

Homeowners usually walk in picking a colour and a size. What the tile’s made of decides half of what happens after that. Porcelain over ceramic on a heated floor, because the denser body conducts and holds heat more evenly. Natural stone over porcelain in a formal entry, because nothing photographs like real marble, and the buyer needs to hear the maintenance trade-off out loud before it goes down, not after. Cement tile needs a sealing plan booked into the install schedule, not an afterthought once the grout’s already dry.

Material decides more than looks and upkeep, too. It decides how the job gets cut. Porcelain, especially the through-body kind, chews through wet saw blades faster than ceramic and needs a diamond blade rated for the density, not whatever’s already on the saw from the last job. Natural stone chips at the edge if it’s cut too fast, so those cuts run slower, which is time billed either way. Glass mosaic needs its own blade entirely, since a standard tile blade shatters the edge instead of scoring it clean. None of that changes the finished look. All of it changes the quote.

Substrate matters just as much, and it tracks the material. A heavier natural stone tile needs a subfloor rated for the extra dead load, especially on an upper floor of an older Vancouver Island home where joist spacing wasn’t planned around stone in the first place. Porcelain and ceramic are lighter and more forgiving. Cement tile sits somewhere in between, dense but not stone-heavy. That’s a conversation worth having before the material gets picked, not after delivery, because swapping a subfloor after the tile’s already on site adds a week nobody budgeted for.

None of that shows up on the sample board at the showroom. It shows up eighteen months later, in a call about a stain that won’t lift or a floor that’s colder than expected. Worth asking about material, not just look, before anything gets ordered.

Jordan Tile & Stone installs ceramic, porcelain, and natural stone tile across Nanaimo, Parksville, and Campbell River, and can walk through which material actually fits a specific room before the order goes in. Check the ceramic tile installation page for what a typical job looks like start to finish. Anyone weighing this up around Campbell River, Courtenay or Comox can ask us and get a real number.

Related Questions

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Jordan Tile & Stone

Tile installation and repair across central Vancouver Island: Campbell River, Courtenay, Comox, Oyster Bay, Nanoose Bay, Parksville, Qualicum Beach and Nanaimo.

Phone: (250) 201-3891
Hours: Monday to Sunday, 7:00 am to 6:00 pm
Address: 4423 Patricia Rd, Oyster Bay, BC V9H 1B8