Amber names both a warm golden-brown to orange-yellow colour and the fossilised tree resin that gives the colour its name, and the two are worth keeping distinct. The resin, hardened over millions of years, sometimes preserving trapped insects, has been prized since the Neolithic; Baltic amber was traded across Europe along established amber roads, worn as ornament and amulet, and valued for the static charge it develops when rubbed, the Greek word for amber, elektron, is the root of the word electricity.
As a colour, amber carries the warm, honeyed associations of its namesake: glow, preservation, warmth, the light of late afternoon. It has no formal liturgical role, but its sense of captured light and of great age gives it a symbolism of memory and preservation. In the modern crystal and colour literature amber the material is grouped with the solar and sacral centres for its warm colour, a recent attribution; its ancient value was as a protective and ornamental substance rather than for any assigned metaphysical property.