Rubedo closes the Great Work, and the Greek term behind it carries a shade of meaning the Latin loses.
The Greek names
The Graeco-Egyptian alchemical corpus gives the work as melanosis, leukosis, xanthosis and iosis. The Latin sequence in general use, nigredo, albedo, citrinitas and rubedo, translates it. The Greek word for the final stage is related to terms for a violet or purple tint as well as for rust, and it is not simply the word for red; the Latin rubedo narrows it.
That narrowing matters when reading a description of the finished work, because the sources are not all describing the same colour.
The end of the sequence
In the practical reading, the reddening is the completion of the operation on the metal. In the spiritual and later psychological readings it is the completed work in whatever sense that author intends. This atlas records the stage, its colour and its position, and records the interpretations as interpretations.
What the whole sequence is
Four stages, a colour each, running from a blackening through to a reddening, attested in the earliest substantial alchemical writings that survive and translated forward from there. Later Latin authors frequently reduce it to three by dropping the yellowing. Nothing in the sequence is a modern invention, which distinguishes it from several other schemes in general circulation.