Pink

Just say "pink" and I'll think of Homer's "rosy-fingered dawn." It is the colour of youthful beginnings - soon to be replaced by hard work and, later, the well-earned rest of the evening. Pink is a complex colour. But as for simple colours, from ancient times, mankind has more or less viewed the basic colours the same: modern scientists say they are red, green and violet-blue. Xenophanes, the ancient philosopher who learned scientific phenomena through his observations of clouds, said:

And she whom they call Iris (the rainbow), this too is by nature a cloud.
Purple, red and greenish-yellow to behold.

In this very verse, he shockingly departed from pantheistic beliefs: Iris is no longer a messenger to the gods, linking the gods to mankind, but - gasp - a mere cloud, even if a rainbow... Meanwhile, the great breakthroughs in how we perceive our vision of colours came in the 19th century, when Helmoholtz examined the inside of the human eye. He sought paramaters of seeing that would be parallel with those of sound - and introduced the variables of hue, saturation and brightness. Incidentally, these variables are also present even in photoshop, which largely depends on computer-generated algorithms, as opposed to the colour theories dreamed up by mankind.

Today we know that the eye sees new colours through a mixture of colours and intensities. Pink is one of these colours. It is complex. Not just a tint of red, it is a mixture of red, white and magenta.

And pink, our naivete, our innocence, our unaware beginnings, is also a mixture of different elements. As Homer's rosy epithet reminds us, the word for pink used to share the root with all Indo-European languages, rosa. Apparently, the Persian word for pink is the colour of the face.

When we look into the colour pink, into the rosy-fingered dawn, do we find ourselves, setting out on adventures?

Elements: pugly pixel washi tape, minitoko doilie frame.

This post was put together in honour of spring colour week over atpoppytalk.