It is rose season here in the mill garden, and I have the colour of roses on my mind.
Because it is so loved, and because it has been so widely cultivated for such a very long time, perhaps no flower has the ability to soak up cultural meaning quite as much as the rose.
From the language of romantic love to that of religion (Sufism’s rose garden; Catholicism’s rosary) roses have a dizzyingly wide range of cultural meanings. Roses are also flowers that, in both wild and cultivated forms, are found in an equally wide range of colourful varieties . . .
From creamy yellows to purply-blues, roses are grown in a huge range of shades and hues, and yet, in the colour nomenclature that is common to many modern western languages, the word rose has weirdly narrow chromatic parameters, suggesting just one single colour: pink.
English is unusual, in fact, in not using rose as a universally accepted shorthand for a soft shade sitting somewhere between red and white, but to (confusingly) use the name of a completely different flower as this colour’s homonym: the pink, ie, the carnation, or dianthus.
How, in French and German did the word rose become the standard homonym for pink? And how, for that matter, did pink come to mean pink at all?
Untangling the chromatic roots of pink and rose is a somewhat complicated affair, but I shall now attempt to do so briefly, with some help from my favourite historian of colour, the inimitable Michel Pastoureau*.
In no western language is pink or rose a basic colour term. While pinks and roses both have long etymological histories as the names of flowers, their chromatic associations are, linguistically speaking, of fairly recent date.
The rose flower – which humans have cultivated since at least 4000 BCE – long precedes the rose colour in Western languages. Though Homer’s description of dawn as rosy-fingered (rhododaktulos) is perhaps the most well-known metaphorical association of the flower with the colour, it is in fact, Pastoureau argues, an anomaly, since roses are very infrequently associated with a specifically pink shade in the languages of the Ancient world, or those of Medieval or Renaissance Europe. Though pink things did, of course, exist, these objects were much more frequently described as flesh-coloured: from the Latin incarnat which is where the English word carnation comes from As late as 1690, in Antonin Furetière’s famous dictionary, the closest definition to pink, Pastoureau suggests, is the following:
Incarnat means the same thing as incarnadin: a beautiful red that represents the living and freshly-cut flesh . . .from the Latin incarnatum. Antonin Furetière Dictionnaire universel (1690)
Incarnata is a meaty, fleshy pink then and there’s a whole other debate to be had about how, between the 1700s and the 20th Century, the colour of “flesh” morphed from the deep pinkish-red of Furetière’s incarnata into the familiar palette of pale colours exclusively associated with white skin. It’s certainly no coincidence that this shift coincides with the simultaneous embedding in western languages with a range of explicitly racist terms for differently coloured human bodies.
In 1690, when Furetière produced his dictionary, then, pink was not specifically associated with roses, nor were roses indelibly associated with the colour pink. But by 1751 when Diderot produced his Encyclopédie, a wide range of pink objects were suddenly described as possessing a teinte rose. What had happened in those 60 years? Why had rose suddenly become a familiar word for pink, and why was pink increasingly associated with roses ?
The answer lies, as it so often does in the history of colour, in the imbrication of modern capitalism with modern culture. In the second half of the eighteenth century, humans were suddenly able to make commodities in a much wider range of shades and hues; and the more products that existed, the more need there was for new terms to distinguish them, describe them, and sell them to consumers.
By the 1750s, colonial expansion and the rise of imperial trade in dyestuffs (produced by the labour of enslaved or indentured people) meant that textiles could be sold to fashionable European consumers in a much wider range of subtle shades. Pastel hues – such as the pale blues produced from indigo and the pale pinks of brazilwood – became much more prevalent, and the portraiture of this period explodes with the gorgeous pastel shades which were achieved when modern methods of brazilwood dyeing combined with expensive silk cloth.
New colour words were needed to describe these new pastel pinks, and textile manufacturers were very aware of the power of language and cultural association in the marketing and selling of their commodities. Evocative, colourful textiles had to be matched with equally evocative names, and what could be more redolent, more loaded with cultural meaning, than the world’s favourite flower, the rose? Pastoureau shows how in French, the word incarnata – with its heavy, meaty, fleshy associations – is gradually replaced during the second half of the eighteenth century by the word rose, the shade of France’s new lustrous pale pink silks. In textile sample books and catalogues, silk fabrics in a range of pastel watercolour shades are described with terms that would later be much derided by twentieth-century colour experts, such as pluie de roses (rain of roses) and cendres de roses (ashes of roses).
Rose pink was no passing mid-century fad, either: in the 1780s and 90s, the fashion for “rose pink” endured in the ribbons that, when combined with a crisp white dress, were the chromatic shorthand of innocent femininity in figures from Werther’s Charlotte. . .
. . . to Thomas Lawrences’s famous portrait of Sarah Goodin Barrett Moulton.
And by 1799, French fashion magazines might simply refer to an outfit as rose with no further elaboration needed.
Pastoureau reveals how the word incarnata – with all its fleshy, meaty associations, is slow to disappear as a colour word in the Italian from which it originates. And although we don’t think much about these links today, in English the word pink still carries a permanent etymological link to flesh, mediated, as it is, through its association with the dianthus or carnation.
In French, however, rose is now the universal homonym for all shades of pink. And in most other western languages, Pastoureau argues, the word rose now suggests the pink colour-concept before describing a particular flower (in much the same way that orange is generally now a colour before it is a fruit).
This then, Pastoureau argues, is how pink became rose, and roses became pink. Do you agree? When the word rose is uttered, do you think pink? Does rose suggest an entirely different shade to you than the mid eighteenth-century pastel from which the colour term emerged? And does anyone still see something meaty in their mind’s eye when they hear the word carnation?
More about my garden roses, and their many shades and hues, anon!
*This whole discussion is greatly indebted to Michel Pastoureau, Pink: The History of a Colour (2025)
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