I am sorry 😞 you are dealing with this. I used Natural Seal and Traffic HD on white oak and my floors are not pink for sure. I noticed that in my master closet by mistake was installed red oak plank and it definitely has pinkish undertone so maybe You are right that you had red oak installed. I think they are some tests to check it. Here is my white oak floors with Bona Natural Seal and Traffic HD.

@angelamm79 Pictures? Your description alone is really not enough for anyone to offer much in the way of advice or help.

@millworkman i will post some pictures but honestly they DO NOT capture the pink that is present in person. The first picture is a white oak plank my contractor put Bona Natural seal on as an example…. even in this picture its clear to see the different undertones.

Upper photo: similar to my gray floor before finishing

Lower photo: appearance varies with the light (i.e., more or less daylight from the window)

@wdccruise are you referring to my photos?

I work with a lot of White Oak floors and with Bona. I have never seen White Oak look like this. I suspect you might have Red Oak based on both the color and the grain. Can you post a photo of any leftover unfinished planks?

"are you referring to my photos?"

Yes but I may have been misunderstood what your first photo showed.

Your floors do not appear to be White Oak. I have never seen a grade like that but it's not typical White Oak.

They do not look like the contractor's sample which is definitely White Oak, however, as an overall coloration I find your floors very pleasing in color. Not what you expected but very nice nonetheless

They look like the lighter sample shown below.

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@Kristin Petro Interiors, Inc.

Can you tell me more about why you suspect these may be red oak based on the grain? I appreciate your help on this!

@BeverlyFLADeziner

Thank you for your contribution to my dilema. While my floors dont look terrible in photos, I assure you in person the pink is very pronounced! 🙈

White Oak has a softer, more linear grain. Red Oak is busier with more "swirls" like yours. As @BeverlyFLADeziner noted, it could just be an odd grade of White Oak. But given the color issue, you would have good reason to suspect it's Red Oak.

Angelamm79

What did you decide to do? I’m in the same boat right now with the “pinkish” floors after 2 coats of bona natural seal and 1 coat of had traffic. I stopped the job.

See my similar (but far less costly) experience with this post:

Ever bought white oak, but got red?

And the pink part was not a trick of the eye, but literally a staining of the treatment that I could scrape off with my fingernail. I have had this happen with antique doors I am refinishing as well...

As you can see by some of the professionals' answers, there is no specific "white oak" tree, nor "red oak" tree, but rather a bunch of different species that get slotted into the two separate boxes and a few in between. (For example, we started a green leaf maple and red leaf maple in the same pot; they grafted onto each other before we planted in yard, and the resulting, single tree is somewhere in between...plenty of trees in a forest can do something similar. ) Plus, what we've Iearned is that in some mills, the decisions to figure out what's what once logs arrive to be planed is often done by "looking at them."

The only way you can know for sure is to send a sample scraping of several of the boards to NWFA or university botany department to have it tested to see if what you have fits neatly into one or the other category...

To the other poster, If it ended up grey after being refinished, this could be a purple hue of the red and white of the wood's tannins mixed with blue-ish undertone that is used to make white "cool." White is not free of other colors, and "natural" sealers have a tiny bit of white in them...

Update: There are a few flooring supply companies that will test your white oak for you for free to see if it is indeed what you paid for, or at least sell you a $30 kit. I used this on white oak that pulled very pink (like pepto bismol after using BonaNatural) and the oak was definitely white oak, not red oak.