Reading a verdict

Every recommendation carries two separate verdicts: whether it works, and whether it is safe on your surface. This page explains what they mean.

Two questions, never one

“Does it work?” and “is it safe here?” are different questions and they routinely disagree. Vinegar descales a kettle and etches a marble worktop — same substance, same mechanism, opposite answers. So every recommendation carries both verdicts, and neither softens the other.

There is no score out of ten. A single number invites false precision and hides the uncertainty the labels exist to show. You can act on “established practitioner practice, mechanism plausible, not experimentally isolated”. Nobody can act on “0.64”.

“Not established” is not permission

Where it has not been established whether something is safe, the answer says so. That is not a cautious yes and it is not silence — it means the evidence needed to answer has not been found, and you should treat the combination as unresolved rather than as cleared.

A warning needs one authoritative source. A clearance needs an authoritative source and the conditions it holds within, which is why the strongest answer here is never a bare “safe” but “safe within these stated conditions”. An over-cautious warning costs you an unnecessary precaution; a wrong clearance costs you the worktop.

Your manufacturer outranks this site

Where your item came with instructions, those instructions govern. Manufacturers disagree with each other about identical-looking parts, and both can be right about their own product, so a maker’s guidance is never generalised to somebody else’s appliance here. Where two makers conflict, both positions are shown rather than averaged.

What we will not tell you about mixing · What each label means