BG

Black is popular, black looks great, black is more expensive, BG/Absolute granite has almost become the de facto standard for kitchen tops in some countries.

Basalts are dark colored, fine-grained extrusive rock. The mineral grains are so fine that they are impossible to distinguish with the naked eye or even a magnifying glass. They are the most widespread of all the igneous rocks. Most basalts are volcanic in origin and were formed by the rapid cooling and hardening of the lava flows. Some basalts are intrusive having cooled inside the Earth's interior.

Black Granites: dark-coloured igneous rocks defined by geologists as basalt, diabase, gabbro, diorite and anorthosite are quarried as building stone, building facings, monuments, and speciality purposes and sold as black granite. The chemical and mineralogical compositions of such rocks are quite different from those of true granites, but black granites nevertheless may be satisfactorily used for some of the same purposes as commercial granite. They possess an interlocking crystalline texture but, unlike granites, they contain little or no quartz or alkali feldspar. Instead, black granites are composed dominantly of intermediate to calcic plagioclase accompanied by one or more common dark rock-forming minerals such as pyroxenes, hornblende, and biotite. Such rocks, because of their relatively high content of iron and magnesium, are designated as ferromagnesian or mafic. An exception is anorthosite which, though commonly dark, consists mostly or entirely of calcic plagioclase". So far a statement by consensus. We can now go ahead to use Black Granite as an umbrella term while offering the material under the (geologically correct) names above.