Marble types and colours: Carrara marble and other styles

How do you choose a marble style?

The style of a marble comes from three things: its base colour, its veining and its surface finish. Once you know what you want from each, the right stone is easier to find than by comparing trade names, because a name often tells you no more than where the stone was quarried. Carrara marble alone is sold under more than a hundred commercial names, and they look clearly different.

Colour: from white to black

Base colour is the first choice. Marble comes in white, cream and beige, grey, black, brown, green, pink and red, and more rarely in bluish tones. Colour alone says little about how the stone wears: white and black calcite marble are etched by acids in exactly the same way, while some green “marbles” are a different stone altogether. The causes of each colour are explained further down, and each colour has its own section.

Veining: bold, fine, cloudy or breccia

Veins are the pattern in the stone. They form when cracks in the rock fill up again with calcite, or when micas and other minerals settle into bands. By pattern, marbles fall roughly into four groups:

A breccia is a rock that was once broken into fragments and then cemented back together. That is why the veins in Calacatta and Arabescato draw a network around pale fragments.

Finish: polished, honed or brushed

You can choose a polished, honed or brushed finish, and the finish changes the look of the same stone more than most people expect. According to the Finnish stone industry association Kiviteollisuusliitto, a polished surface brings out colours and textures, while rougher finishes soften them and lighten the shade.

The right finish depends on where the piece goes. Polished stone suits a marble coffee table in a living room, but for marble kitchen countertops experts quoted by the Natural Stone Institute call honed or textured marble more practical, because etching shows less. Caring for each finish is covered in the guide to marble cleaning and care.

Why are no two marble pieces ever the same?

Every marble piece is unique, for two reasons. First, it is made to order to your measurements. Second, marble is a natural stone, so its shade and veining vary from slab to slab and even within one slab. Kiviteollisuusliitto describes lively colour and structure as typical of natural stone and says that aiming for a perfectly even colour runs against the basic nature of the stone.

That is why a photo or a sample shows the style of a stone, not your actual piece. The finished piece will not look exactly like a photo or like another piece. Even within one name the range can be wide: Bianco Carrara is graded C, CD and D by background colour, with C the lightest and D the darkest. Printed imitations work the other way round. One maker of large marble-look porcelain slabs offers only 3-6 different faces per design, so the same pattern repeats across a floor or wall.

Where do the colours and veins in marble come from?

Very pure limestone becomes white marble, and every other colour comes from impurities: minerals and other matter mixed into the rock. Clay minerals, iron oxides and bituminous material turn marble bluish, grey, pink, yellow or black.

White veins in a dark stone are usually calcite that crystallised in cracks formed later. The veins of Statuario and Calacatta, on the other hand, come from muscovite, a mica, and chlorite.

Carrara marble: what does the name really mean?

Carrara marble is a calcite marble quarried in the Apuan Alps in Tuscany, Italy. In 2017 the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) designated the Carrara marble area a Global Heritage Stone Resource. There are more than a hundred quarries, marble has been extracted there since before Roman times, and Michelangelo, Donatello, Canova and Bernini all carved it.

Carrara is not a single stone, though. According to the geologist Piero Primavori, more than 150 commercial varieties are sold under the Carrara name, some of them quarried in the surrounding Apuan areas such as Massa and Versilia. The IUGS lists seven main varieties: Bianco Carrara, Venato, Bardiglio, Nuvolato, Arabescato, Statuario and Calacatta.

Bianco Carrara, Venato, Bardiglio and Nuvolato

Despite the word bianco, white, Bianco Carrara is in Primavori’s words light grey in colour. The letter after the name gives the background colour: C is white to whitish and even, CD is less white and D is a darker light grey. An almost veinless, evenly white Bianco P is rare and sought after.

Is Finlandia Hall clad in Carrara marble?

Not any more. Finlandia Hall in Helsinki was first clad in white Carrara marble with blue-grey veins (the concert wing in 1971, the congress wing in 1975), but the panels began to bow. In 1998-1999 they were replaced with marble from the Carrara area, which bowed in the same way, so each facade lasted only 20-25 years. In 2022-2023 the building was re-clad with Lasa marble from South Tyrol, chosen on the basis of EU research and a test wall that stood on the roof. Kiviteollisuusliitto recommends marble mainly for interiors, and how marble behaves with heat and moisture is explained in the guide to marble properties.

Calacatta, Statuario and Arabescato: the rarer white marbles

Statuario, Calacatta and Arabescato are rarer white marbles of the Carrara area, and far less of them is quarried than of ordinary Bianco Carrara.

• Statuario is a white to ivory, crystalline and pure stone with no veins or very faint ones. Primavori calls it probably the most precious and famous of the Carrara marbles. Its output is much smaller than that of ordinary white, and the price reflects that.
• Calacatta is a breccia: pale, yellowish-white fragments in a matrix rich in muscovite and chlorite. Its veins are a few centimetres wide, from light grey to pale gold. It is named after the Calacata locality north of Torano and is quarried only in Carrara proper.
• Arabescato is also a breccia, with veins that draw arabesques in grey, yellowish, purplish or brownish tones on a white ground. More of it comes from Versilia and Garfagnana than from Carrara itself.

Carrara or Calacatta? In short, Bianco Carrara and Venato are greyish white with thin grey veins, while Calacatta is whiter with wide, striking veins. According to Primavori, makers of artificial stone have copied Calacatta perhaps more than any other natural stone. That is why there are so many quartz worktops called Calacatta, and how they differ from the real stone is covered in marble vs quartz.

How much does Carrara marble cost in Finland?

In the online price lists of stone sellers operating in Finland, a marble worktop starts at about €240 per square metre for the material, and Venato Carrara, for example, costs €518/m² or €363 per linear metre. The examples below are other sellers’ published prices on 13 November 2026, not our prices. All include VAT.

The price depends on the variety, size, thickness, edges and cut-outs. One price list names 20 mm as the cheapest thickness and says 30 mm and a thickened front edge raise the price. Statuario and Calacatta usually cost more than ordinary Carrara because less of them is quarried.

All the marble we use comes from Iran, so we do not sell Carrara marble: these figures are a reference point. We do not publish our own prices here either, because they depend on the size, thickness, stone, edges, cut-outs and installation of each piece. You get the price in a quote.

Black marble: Nero Marquina is geologically a limestone

One of the best-known black marbles, Nero Marquina from Spain, is geologically a limestone rather than a metamorphic marble. According to researchers at the University of the Basque Country, the black Markina limestone formed on a shallow subtropical carbonate platform in the Cretaceous. Its black colour comes from organic matter spread through the rock, and the white veins are later cracks filled with calcite. It has been quarried for more than a hundred years and was used, for example, in the lobby of the Empire State Building and for the lectern at the UN headquarters.

The stone trade still calls Nero Marquina a marble, and in the commercial sense that is correct. In daily use the difference is small, because limestone is the same calcium carbonate as marble and is etched by acids in the same way. The Natural Stone Institute points out that products containing lemon, vinegar or other acids may dull or etch calcareous stone.

With black stone the choice of finish matters more than usual. Etching shows more on a polished surface than on a honed one, and a pale, dull mark stands out especially clearly on a black mirror finish. Black and dark grey Iranian options are in the table further down.

Green marble is often serpentinite

Many green marbles on the market are not calcite marble at all but serpentinite, a rock dominated by the dark green mineral serpentine. According to the trade magazine Litos, the largest deposits of green marble are in India, and they are serpentine rock. A well-known example is Verde Guatemala, whose name is misleading: the stone is quarried in India, in the Udaipur and Dungarpur districts of Rajasthan, and is also sold as Indian Green, Rajasthan Green and Verde Udaipur. The Indian green deposits were discovered in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The darker material tends to have cracks, so much of it is sold as tiles.

Serpentinite behaves differently from calcite marble. A maker of stone care products describes the Italian Verde Alpi as naturally resistant to acids, and the maker’s marble repair kit does not work on it. The lighter zones of Verde Guatemala, however, contain carbonates such as dolomite or calcite. So always ask for the care instructions of a green stone stone by stone.

Real green marble exists too. Lappia Green from Kittilä in Finnish Lapland is a dolomite marble that gets its green colour from a chromium-bearing mica, fuchsite. It has been quarried since 1976, and Kiviteollisuusliitto calls it the most important Finnish marble today. It contains small amounts of pyrite that discolour the stone as they weather, so it is suitable for indoor use only. In the Cipollino varieties of the Carrara area, green, grey or reddish-brown silicate veins cross a white ground.

Green stone from Iran is usually green onyx in the trade, and onyx is not marble.

Pink, red and blue marble

Pink marble

Iron oxides are among the impurities that give marble a pink tone. Among the marbles of Estremoz in Portugal, the most valuable are the light pink Rosa Aurora and Rosa Portugal, the latter also known as Rosa Portogallo. Estremoz marble has been quarried since at least 370 BC, and its colours range from pure white to dark blue.

Finland has quarried pinkish marble too. Nordsjö marble from Vuosaari in Helsinki is a white, salmon-coloured or grey calcite marble with dark brown dolomite layers. Salmon-red Nordsjö marble was used in Finnish interiors and on facades in Gothenburg, and between 1951 and 1965 it was also cut into tabletops. The well-known pink stone from Iran is Persian Pink Onyx, which is an onyx, not a marble.

Red marble

Red and reddish-brown tones typically come from iron oxides. Among the rare Carrara varieties, Paonazzo is a breccia with a matrix ranging from grey-black to red-violet. A well-known red stone from Iran, Azarshahr red travertine, is a travertine, which is a limestone, and its red, brown or yellow colour comes from iron oxide.

Blue marble

Marbles sold as blue are usually bluish grey, because impurities can turn white marble bluish or grey. Bardiglio Imperiale from Carrara is an even grey-blue, and some Estremoz varieties are dark blue. The bright blue Azul Macaubas from Brazil, by contrast, is a quartzite: the stone is mostly quartz, and about 15% of it is the mineral dumortierite. Sellers sometimes call it marble as well.

Brown and beige marble: Emperador and Crema Marfil

A well-known brown marble is Emperador from Spain, but geologically Emperador Dark, for example, is a limestone breccia: angular fragments of limestone cemented together by calcite. Its browns come from iron hydroxide, and the pale veins are calcite. The stone formed in the Miocene.

Beige Crema Marfil is also a limestone: a compact beige stone with calcite veins, fossils and orange-red streaks. It is quarried mainly on El Coto mountain in Pinoso, in the province of Alicante, from about 20 quarries. The producer’s stated water absorption is only 0.07%, which shows that limestone can be very dense too.

Iran produces cream and beige marbles, but they are sometimes sold abroad under borrowed names. One Iranian online seller, for example, sells Iranian Dehbid marble as Crema Marfil. A name therefore does not prove origin, so always ask for the country and quarry region of the stone.

Which famous marbles are not geologically marble?

Many well-known marbles are geologically a different stone, and that is normal in the stone trade. In geology, marble means limestone changed by heat and pressure, but the natural stone industry can call any polishable calcareous stone a marble. This is not a trick but trade language. What matters to a buyer is how the stone behaves:

Onyx marble is neither marble nor onyx

Onyx marble is calcite or aragonite deposited from cold water in caves, rock crevices and around springs. According to Britannica it is, in the strict sense, neither marble nor onyx, because true onyx is a banded chalcedony made largely of silica. Onyx marble is often brown or yellow because of iron oxide, and the green and pink varieties are translucent. One Iranian stone supplier describes onyx as soft and fragile and therefore unsuitable for floors, kitchen worktops or dining tables.

Which marble styles come from Iran?

All the marble we use comes from Iran, and Iranian quarries produce many styles from creamy white to black. Below are the varieties that international stone suppliers describe as Iranian. They show which styles come from Iranian quarries, not what we have in stock.

Iranian green and pink stones are usually onyx in the trade, and cream and red Iranian stones are often travertine, such as the cream travertine of Mahallat and the red travertine of Azarshahr. We found no reliable source for an Iranian white marble like Carrara or a brown marble like Emperador, so we do not promise one. Iranian quarry regions and the properties of the stones are covered in more depth on the Iranian marble page.

Real marble or a marble look?

In many shops “marble” is the name of a colour or pattern, not a material. A “white marble” can be the print on a laminate worktop, and marble-look products are also made from quartz composite and porcelain. This is how to recognise real marble:

• Material details. Check what material is listed for the top or surface. Words such as marble-look, marble effect, imitation marble, ceramic, sintered stone, MDF and laminate mean it is not marble.
• Weight. Marble has a density of about 2.6-2.7 g/cm³, so a 2 cm slab weighs about 53-54 kg per square metre (our own calculation).
• Repeating pattern. In a printed product the same pattern repeats; in natural stone it never does.
• Coolness. Marble conducts heat well (2.08-2.94 W/mK) and so feels cool, but porcelain (1.5 W/mK) feels cool too, so touch alone is not enough.

Do not test a finished piece with acid: vinegar or lemon leaves a dull mark on real marble. Real marble tiles are covered on the marble tiles page.

How do you describe the style you want in a quote request?

Describe what you want in the same order as this guide: colour, veining and finish, plus where the piece will go. “Dark grey, fine white veins, honed finish, kitchen island” tells us more than a trade name. Attach an inspiration photo if you have one, and say what you like about it: the colour, the amount of veining or the shine.

Once we know the style and the use, we suggest Iranian stones that match your wish and explain the options. Remember that a photo or sample shows the style, not your actual piece, because every slab is different. Send your wishes and measurements with a quote request, and see the measuring guide for what to measure.

Our other guides on marble properties, care and material comparisons are collected in the marble guides.