TrueWhite™ is the first colourway in the Baustone® range - a clean, consistent white finish with none of the veining, mineral flecking, or tonal variation you get in natural stone or engineered composites. It's the flagship finish for Baustone® Solid Surface countertops and stone resin baths, and it's the one currently carrying the lifetime guarantee (product only, excluding labour and reinstallation).

Corian® pioneered solid surface and remains the best-known name in the category - for good reason. Its patent expiring is what allowed the wider solid surface market, including Baustone®, to exist at all.

What's changed since is manufacturing, not the underlying principle. Most solid surfaces today - Corian® included - share the same basic composition: a mineral-filled acrylic or polyester resin, cast and cured into a non-porous surface. The differences between brands come down to mineral ratio, resin quality, and finishing process - not a fundamentally different material.

Baustone® is formulated and manufactured to our own specification, developed specifically for the demands of vanity units, basins, and baths rather than adapted from a general-purpose sheet material. It shares the core properties the category is known for - non-porous, stain-resistant, seamless, repairable - and is backed by our own lifetime guarantee on the material.

We don't position Baustone® as "better than Corian®." We position it as ours: developed for BAULANE products, sold direct, without the distributor markup that Corian® based products typically carry by the time they reach a showroom floor.

These terms get used interchangeably across the bathroom industry. They're not quite the same thing.

Solid surface is the broadest category - a non-porous material that's solid all the way through, not just coated or laminated on top. Colour and pattern run through the full thickness. It's typically a mineral-filled resin, and it's the category Corian made famous.

Stone resin is a solid surface with a higher ratio of natural mineral to resin. That higher mineral content is what gives baths and basins their weight, their heat retention - water stays warmer for longer - and the solid, stone-like feel when you tap the surface.

Stone composite is a broader term, often used for materials with a different construction - crushed quartz bound with resin, for example, which behaves more like engineered stone than true solid surface, or products that aren't solid through their full thickness.

Baustone® is a solid surface material. For our baths and basins, its mineral content places it firmly in stone resin territory too - which is why you'll see both terms used across our product pages, depending on the piece.

Gel-coat is a common, lower-cost way to finish baths - a thin resin coating sprayed onto a mould (usually over fibreglass or acrylic) to create a glossy surface layer. It's not a solid material; it's a coating, typically 0.5–1mm thick, sitting on top of a different substrate underneath.

Baustone® is solid all the way through. There's no coating to wear, chip, or separate from a base layer - what you see on the surface is the same material all the way through the piece. This is why our baths are more expensive than cheaper competitors - because we invest more into our manufacturing from the highest-grade mineral composites, and why we can confidently classify our products as 'hotel-grade'.

That difference matters most over time and after damage:

• Scratches and chips: Gel-coat damage exposes the substrate beneath - once it chips, you're often looking at a visible patch repair or a colour mismatch. Baustone® can be sanded and polished back to its original finish, because the material doesn't change beneath the surface.
• Repairability: Gel-coat repairs are a specialist job and rarely invisible. Baustone repairs restore the actual surface, not a patch over it.
• Weight and feel: Gel-coat baths are lightweight, because the coating is thin and the substrate (usually fibreglass or acrylic) is doing the structural work. Baustone's higher mineral content gives it real weight and better heat retention — water stays warmer for longer.
• Longevity: Gel-coat is prone to yellowing, micro-cracking (often called "crazing"), and surface dulling over years of use, particularly with harsh cleaning products. Solid surface materials like Baustone® don't share this failure mode, because there's no separate coating layer to degrade.

Gel-coat isn't a bad material - it's why lower-cost baths can be made affordably. But it's a coating, not a solid material, and that's the core distinction worth understanding before you choose between our products, or our competitors.