Rose

Rose is a pale, soft red tending toward pink, named for the flower, and it carries a symbolism distinct from full red: where red is passion, blood and urgency, rose is love softened into tenderness, gentleness and affection, the warmth of red without its heat. The rose flower itself is among the most freighted symbols in Western culture, sacred to Venus and Aphrodite as the flower of love, and in Christianity attached to the Virgin Mary, the rose without thorns, and to the blood of the martyrs. This dual inheritance, erotic and devotional, colours the hue.

In the Christian liturgy a distinct rose is worn on two days, Gaudete Sunday in Advent and Laetare Sunday in Lent, when the penitential violet is lightened to mark a note of joy amid the fast, one of the few times a specific pale shade carries an official liturgical meaning. In the modern colour and crystal literature rose is tied to the heart centre and to compassion and self-love, a recent association resting on the same gentleness.

Rose and pink are pale reds, and pale reds were both technically awkward and slow to acquire names of their own.

The workable material was the lake, a dye precipitated onto an inert white base so that it can be used as a pigment. Madder lake, made from the madder root, is the classic rose lake of European painting, and it is a glaze: transparent, luminous over a light ground, and prone to fading in strong light. A great many pink passages in old paintings are now paler than they were, and some have gone entirely. Brazilwood lakes were cheaper and faded faster still.

The word itself is young. Pink in English named a plant, the garden pink, a Dianthus, before it named a colour, and the colour sense dates from around the seventeenth century. Before that a pale red was described as a pale red, or as rose, or by the name of the flower or fabric it resembled.

That lateness is the expected pattern. Pink sits with orange, purple, brown and grey among the basic colour terms that languages acquire after the primary set, and its arrival in English is documented in exactly the period the sequence predicts.

The modern association of pink with girls is more recent still. Early twentieth century sources in English speaking countries can be found recommending the opposite, pink for boys as a diminutive of red, and the current convention settled in the middle of the twentieth century. It is a marketing convention and not a tradition.