The featured image above is from Formica.com
I dislike many aspects of the kitchen in my house. The previous owners took a well-designed and well-built 1959 house, and basically screwed it up by, among other things, putting in a trendy “designer” kitchen. Amongst the hate-able aspects of that kitchen are the obligatory granite countertops.
Today, as I was housecleaning, scraping little bits of crap off those perpetually-grungy kitchen countertops, I had a flash of insight.
Seems like stuff sticks to these granite countertops to an extent that never happened with our old Formica (r) countertops. It’s almost as if granite countertops are mostly for show, and are a really poor choice if you are actually going to use your kitchen intensively. Heck, I keep a plastic paint scraper at the sink, just for scraping up the most-stuck-on stuff from those countertops. I’m pretty sure I never needed that with Formica (r).
Gunk just seems to glue itself to those granite countertops.
That’s when the light bulb lit. It really isn’t my imagination that granite is tougher to keep clean than Formica (r). My perpetually grungy granite is the flip side of the difficulty of gluing certain types of plastic. If Teflon is at one end of the spectrum, then polished granite is somewhere near the other end.
It’s all about surface energy.