Anyone old enough to have been watching TV in the 1980s might remember a commercial from Persil washing powder promising to make your white laundry ‘whiter than white’. 

It’s quite a claim. After all, white’s white. Right? Actually, that detergent manufacturer may just have been on to something, as some whites are quite definitely whiter than others. And it’s not just when you’re putting on a load of washing that this can matter. It’s important in kitchen surfaces, too. Particularly when you're working with a material like quartz, which is made of several components, including stone aggregates and resin. One white quartz surface can easily be whiter than another, depending how and where it is manufactured.

Quartz is normally a clear or greyish colour and often has a lot of additional minerals in it, which, when mixed with the resin that bonds the material together, can create a white that wouldn’t pass the Persil test. It is difficult to make a pure white quartz.

But CRL Stone has compared its white quartz with all the major suppliers in the UK and confidently declares it has the whitest white on the block.

How does it achieve this? The company's material, CRL Qyartz, comes from a factory near the site of a natural white quartz, which is rare and makes all the difference. The secret also lies in the blending, as the quartz has to be ground down into a fine powder to achieve a solid white colour with no pockets of resin.

That said, a practically perfect white isn’t always what is wanted, but once it has been achieved, other ingredients can be added to offer a range of different whites. The fact that some whites are less white than others means kitchen designers can choose from several different whites, choosing the best to go with furniture or to match with the white used elsewhere in the kitchen.

With no less than seven different whites for kitchen surfaces in the CRL quartz collection, not to mention an option with marble veining, CRL Stone’s offering would pass the Persil challenge and then some. For the whitest white, see CRL Stone's Ultra White kitchen surfaces.