Rose quartz sits in the cool band at #aa98a9. The name carries a real history — rose has been describing this part of the spectrum for longer than the spectrum has been a word.
The Latin *rosa*
The Latin rosa, the Greek rhodon, the Persian gul — every European language has a different name for the same flower and the same color. Rose covers the spectrum from blush to fuchsia depending on the cultivar, but in pigment shorthand it means a cool, slightly bluish red — the inside of a damask petal, the dye that washes out of madder root.
A mid cool neutral
Sits at OKLCH lightness 0.70, chroma 0.032, hue 328° — a mid cool neutral with almost no chromatic content. The eye reads it as a surface, not a hue.
Mid-luminance — the body-text decision goes either way. Test both directions; a 4.5:1 ratio against pure white or pure black is reachable, neither is automatic.
Pairings + neighbors
Triadic counterparts sit at #a9aa97 and #97a9aa — three slices of the wheel 120° apart, the classic balanced trio. The pairings stay in the cool register if all three keep their saturation; pull one toward neutral and the trio turns into a feature-with-supporting-cast.
The closest curated cousin in the library is Ash at #9ca3af — a near-perceptual match (ΔE 10.0 in CIELAB). Worth the click if today's color almost works but you want to test a sibling.
Auto-composed from the etymology corpus and computed color properties · subject to revision