Red Color Stories
From ancient China, where ground cinnabar colored the lacquered thrones and ceremonial vessels of the imperial court, to Renaissance Europe's cochineal, a crimson dye pressed from Mexican insects and reserved for the robes of cardinals, red was the sign of prestige. By the twentieth century, synthetic dyes had turned red into an everyday color, no longer reserved for the powerful. Today's reds range from soft blush pastels and cherry brights to the deep tones of wine and burnished rust. Here are some of those Reds in our Collections. We print all of them on demand for you on our Wallpaper, Fabric and Home Décor Products:
/ CHRISTMAS RED / deep, saturated red, the color of the holiday.
German-born cartoonist Thomas Nast introduced Santa Claus to American audiences in an 1863 Harper's Weekly cover, "Santa Claus in Camp," showing him delivering gifts to Union soldiers in a star-spangled, patriotically colored coat. Over the 33 Christmas illustrations Nast drew for the magazine through 1886, that costume settled into the plump, red-suited figure recognized today — a shift from the tan-colored Santa common before him.
Nast's version drew on his own childhood memory of Saint Nicholas Day in Germany, honoring a 4th-century bishop whose feast was traditionally celebrated on December 6th — a European gift-giving tradition centuries older than any American illustration.
/ RASPBERRY / deep, dark pink-red.
The color name entered English relatively recently, first recorded in 1892, borrowed from the deep, jammy red of the berry itself.
One of the earliest documented uses of the name in fashion survives at London's Victoria and Albert Museum: a 1913 design titled simply "Raspberry," a deep pink-red skirt suit paired with a dark brown fur muff and stole, from a bound album of designs by Madame Elizabeth Handley-Seymour, one of London's leading court dressmakers of the era.
Its most famous modern reference came nearly a century later: Prince's 1985 single “Raspberry Beret,” which fixed the color's playful, slightly vintage connotation firmly into pop culture.
/ RADIANT RED / vivid, saturated orange-red, the color of speed.
This exact shade of red has been the official color of Italian motorsport for over a century. In 1907, Italian aristocrat Prince Scipione Borghese won the grueling Peking to Paris race, 9,317 miles in 61 days, driving a red Itala automobile. In tribute, Italy adopted that red, rosso corsa, as its national racing color, the way France raced in blue and Britain in green.
When Enzo Ferrari founded his own marque decades later, he carried the color forward, and it remains the shade most associated with Ferrari, Alfa Romeo, and Ducati today.
/ CHERRY RED / saturated, deep red with a slight blue undertone.
Dorothy Draper, the influential American decorator, used cherry-red floors as part of her signature high-contrast, high-color schemes, believing that "lovely, clear colours have a vital effect on our mental happiness." Interior designer Miles Redd has advocated for its use in moderation to create focal points, comparing its effect in a room to red lipstick on a face.
Draper's philosophy played out at scale in 1946, when she took on the largest hotel redecoration in American history at the time: a $4.2 million overhaul of The Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, which had spent the war as an army hospital. Her red wingback armchairs, set against the lobby's black-and-white checkerboard marble floor, became one of the defining images of the reopened hotel.
/ INDIAN RED / medium, warm brick-red.
A genuine historic pigment, an iron oxide, or hematite, originally mined on the Indian subcontinent and traded to European painters for centuries, valued for a warmth and permanence few other reds could match.
Rembrandt relied on it and pigments like it constantly, building the deep, glowing shadows and grounds of his paintings from layers of natural iron oxide earths rather than costlier alternatives, a technique modern conservators have confirmed through pigment analysis of his canvases. Its stability has kept paintings made with it looking remarkably unchanged centuries later, which kept it a staple on professional painters' palettes long after cheaper synthetic reds became available.
/ RADIANT CORAL / bright, warm coral-orange with a pink undertone.
This exact shade has a real center of production: the Italian coastal town of Torre del Greco, near Naples, where coral harvesting is documented back to at least the 15th century. The jewelry industry there formally began in 1805, when the King of Naples granted a ten-year manufacturing monopoly to a coral broker from Marseille, and the trade quickly earned the coral its local nickname, “red gold.”
Generations of Torre del Greco family workshops have carved this coral into necklaces, cameos, and beads ever since, supplying European courts and, later, global jewelry markets; some of these firms are still operating today, even as environmental concerns have made the material increasingly contested.
/ CARMINE / deep, dark red, one of the oldest reds in painting.
Carmine comes from cochineal, a tiny scale insect farmed by Mesoamerican peoples for over two thousand years, once used to dye the clothing and feathers of Aztec nobility. After the 1519 conquest, it became one of Spain's most valuable exports, and European royalty and the Catholic clergy adopted it too. Titian used it for Bacchus's flowing red drapery in Bacchus and Ariadne (1520–23).
The same pigment still colors lipstick and blush today, listed on labels as "carmine" or "Natural Red 4." The FDA approved it for cosmetics in 1977, and it remains prized over synthetic reds for staying color-fast through heat, light, and hours of wear.
/ CINNABAR RED / earthy warm red with a strong orange undertone.
Cinnabar is mercury sulphide in its natural mineral form, in continuous use since Neolithic cave paintings in Spain dating to around 7000 BC. It was the dominant red in Chinese lacquerware, imperial seals, and ceremonial objects for thousands of years, where its particular orange-leaning warmth carried explicit associations with luck, vitality, and imperial authority. Chinese cinnabar lacquer, built up in dozens of layers and carved into intricate relief, became one of the most prized luxury exports of the Ming and Qing dynasties. The pigment's extreme toxicity, a consequence of its mercury content, was well understood by the Renaissance, yet artists continued to use it regardless for its unmatched warmth and opacity, until synthetic alternatives became available in the 20th century.
/ OLD RED ROSE / dusty, muted rose-pink, softened with gray.
This shade carries the name of a color rebrand. Victorians called this exact dusky pink “ashes of roses,” a name considered too melancholy by the time the Edwardian era arrived, when it was shortened to the plainer “old rose.”
The older name resurfaced in popular memory through the 1983 television miniseries The Thorn Birds, in which Rachel Ward's character makes a memorable entrance in an “ashes of roses” gown, a moment that helped keep the original phrase alive in fashion vocabulary ever since.
/ MAROON / bold, warm red with a strong pink undertone.
The name derives from the French marron (chestnut) though the connection to this particular vivid, pink-leaning red is a linguistic drift rather than a direct colour match, first recorded in English in 1789.
The tone was historically achievable through madder root (Rubia tinctorum), one of the oldest dye plants in cultivation, used across ancient Egypt, Persia, and India to produce deep reds in wool and silk. Its institutional associations were cemented through the 19th century, when this precise depth of red became a standard for school and university colours across Britain and the United States, chosen for its seriousness and visual authority.
It remains one of the most widely used colours in sports identity and academic heraldry, carrying a consistent weight of tradition and establishment.
/ LUMINOUS SCARLET / vivid, glowing red-pink, intense and saturated.
This glowing, jewel-toned red comes from lac, extracted from the resin of the Kerria lacca insect native to India and Southeast Asia. Lac has colored silk and wool for more than two thousand years. The word "lake," still used today for a whole family of pigments, comes directly from "lac," carried into English by way of Arabic and Persian trade routes.
/ CHILI PEPPER / deep, blue-leaning red, dark in value, fully saturated.
The color takes its name from the dried red chili pepper (Capsicum annuum), whose skin deepens from bright red to this darker, more complex tone in the drying process. The pigment responsible, capsanthin, is unique to the Capsicum genus, and was one of the first natural pigments to be chemically isolated, identified by Richard Kuhn and Edgar Lederer in 1931.
As a dye, dried chili skins have been used in Mesoamerican textile traditions for centuries, producing warm reds and russet tones in wool and cotton.
It is also the color of Dr. Martens' original 1460 boot, introduced in 1960 and still one of the brand's signature colorways today, closely tied to British punk and skinhead subcultures from the 1960s through the 1980s.
/ RED VIOLET / vivid, medium-toned red with a cool violet cast.
Red-violet owes its existence as a named hue to Moses Harris, an English engraver and entomologist who published The Natural System of Colours in 1766, one of the first color wheels to systematically name the in-between tones sitting between a primary and a secondary color. Harris needed precise, repeatable color language to describe the insects he studied and illustrated, and his wheel mapped out exactly this kind of tertiary tone, generated by mixing red with the purple that red and blue produce together.
His system, hand-painted and engraved well before synthetic dyes existed, became a foundational reference for later color theory, establishing the naming logic that still places red-violet exactly where it sits today: not quite red, not quite purple, but a definite, namable color of its own.
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/ BEETROOT / dark, deep, intensely pigmented and cool red with a strong purple undertone.
The color comes directly from betacyanin, the pigment compound responsible for the extraordinary staining intensity of Beta vulgaris, a plant cultivated since antiquity across the Mediterranean and used as a dye source long before it became a food crop.
Roman physicians recorded its use as a medicinal colourant, and beetroot juice served as an informal ink and fabric dye through the medieval period, valued for the depth of this particular purple-red despite its tendency to fade.
The pigment gained new commercial relevance in the 20th century as a natural food colourant, registered as E162, and became a key ingredient in the clean-label movement's push to replace synthetic reds in processed food from the 1990s onwards. In fashion and interiors the tone has surged repeatedly as a sophisticated alternative to burgundy, most recently as part of the broader 2020s appetite for complex, fruit-saturated darks.
/ MUTED PALE RED / soft, dusty pale pink, quiet and understated.
In the early 1700s, Venetian painter Rosalba Carriera helped establish pastel as a serious portrait medium, prized across Europe for exactly this kind of soft, powdery pink used in flesh tones. Her sitters included Louis XV of France and members of the Saxon and Austrian royal courts, and her velvety technique made her one of the most sought-after portraitists of her time.
This exact soft, faded pink later became a signature of British designer Laura Ashley, whose eponymous company built an entire aesthetic around Victorian- and Edwardian-inspired floral prints starting in the 1950s and 60s, dyed in muted, washed-out tones.
By the 1970s and 80s, Ashley's soft pink prints had become a defining look of British homes and wardrobes, later cemented further when Princess Diana was photographed wearing the brand before her 1981 wedding.
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/ PERSIMMON / warm, burnt orange-red, named for the fruit.
The word comes from pasimenan, a term in the Powhatan language, spoken by Indigenous nations in the Tidewater region that English colonists would go on to name Virginia. Colonists at Jamestown were among the first Europeans to encounter the fruit; Captain John Smith described it in 1607, writing that an unripe one "will drive a man's mouth awrie with much torment," though ripe it was "as delicious as an apricock." The color name itself didn't enter English usage until centuries later, borrowed to describe the fruit's vivid, glossy orange-red skin.
Persimmon has had a real resurgence in interiors recently, named one of the defining color trends of Spring 2025 by Better Homes & Gardens, with designers like Laurie DiGiacomo and Ellie Stein citing its warm, sun-kissed quality as an easy way to bring an inviting, cozy energy into a room without the intensity of a true orange.
/ RED MAHOGANY / warm, reddish-brown, the color of the wood.
Mahogany overtook walnut as England's most fashionable furniture wood after 1721, when Parliament's Naval Stores Act removed import duties on colonial timber, flooding London workshops with wood from Jamaica, Cuba, and later Honduras. The decades that followed, sometimes called furniture's “Golden Age,” produced the work of Thomas Chippendale and defined Georgian interiors.
And, mahogany is back: Homes & Gardens named it a defining trend of 2025, with designers like Sims Hilditch and Becky Shea folding its deep reddish tones back into contemporary rooms for warmth and contrast against lighter materials like marble or travertine.
/ TOMATO RED / warm, orange-red, named for the fruit.
This warm red appears as one of the signature colorways in the work of Kaffe Fassett, the American-born, London-based textile designer widely considered one of the most influential colorists in contemporary quilting and fabric design.
In 1988, Fassett became the first living textile designer to be given a solo show at London's Victoria and Albert Museum, and his fabric lines, including the "Tomato" colorway in his well-known Millefiore print, remain a staple among quilters and sewists worldwide for their bold, saturated use of color.
/ SHOCKING PINK / vivid, saturated pink with a violet edge.
Named and claimed by fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli in 1937, the color Shocking Pink even had a perfume named after it. Inspired by a Cartier pink diamond belonging to her client Daisy Fellowes, a Singer sewing machine heiress and one of the era's leading style icons, Schiaparelli described the color as evoking the vivid hues of China and Peru rather than anything typically Western, "pure and undiluted."
The perfume's bottle, shaped like a woman's torso, was designed by Surrealist artist Leonor Fini, and the color became inseparable from Schiaparelli's provocative, art-driven approach to fashion between the two World Wars.
/ CADMIUM RED / pure, warm red with an orange bias.
Cadmium red is one of the few colour names that refers directly to its own chemistry. The pigment, cadmium selenosulfide, was first synthesised in 1907 by the German chemist Richard Müller-Jacobs, made possible by the earlier isolation of the element cadmium in 1817. What distinguished it immediately was its opacity and lightfastness: earlier warm reds had been fugitive, shifting or fading over time, while cadmium red held its intensity permanently.
Henri Matisse adopted it as a primary tool, using it in flat, unmodulated planes across his major works of the 1910s and 1920s to assert colour as a structural force in its own right. Mark Rothko returned to it repeatedly in his large-scale colour field paintings of the 1950s, where its saturated warmth became a vehicle for sustained emotional intensity.
/ RED BRICK ROAD / warm, dusty red, the color of old brick.
Red brick became London's dominant building material after the Great Fire of 1666 destroyed roughly 13,000 wooden buildings; the Rebuilding Act that followed banned timber construction in the city outright. The taste for red brick specifically was reinforced by the court of Charles II, which favored a style popular in the Low Countries.
That style had deep roots on the continent. Stone was scarce across the North European Plain, so builders in the Low Countries and northern Germany had been firing clay for centuries — the Brick Gothic churches of the Hanseatic League, rising from the 1200s in cities like Lübeck and Gdańsk, still stand in that same deep red.
/ KASHMIRI CHILI / deep, brick red-orange, named for the pepper.
The shade takes its name from Kashmiri chilies, bred over generations for saturated color rather than heat — closer to paprika than a hot pepper. That same red-orange has long shown up in Kashmiri textiles, especially the deep-dyed wool of pashmina shawls and the madder-and-lac dyes used across South Asian textile traditions.
In interiors and fashion, it reads as a warmer, earthier alternative to true red — often paired with saffron, ochre, and deep browns in the kind of spice-market palette that's had steady staying power in autumn collections and warm, layered interiors.
/ SCARLET RED / vivid, deep red with a cool undertone.
For centuries, the finest scarlet dye came from kermes, a tiny insect harvested from Mediterranean oak trees, so precious that scarlet cloth was reserved for royalty and, in the Catholic Church, for cardinals' robes.
On May 23, 1910, the Harvard Corporation formally adopted this shade of red as the university's official color. The choice traced back to silk scarves worn by Harvard's rowing crew at the 1858 Boston City Regatta, still preserved today in the university archives as the color's original reference point.
/ REVOLUTIONARY RED / deep, saturated red, the color of protest.
Red's association with revolution dates to the French Revolution, when the bonnet rouge, a red Phrygian cap, became the badge of the Jacobins and sans-culottes, signaling their willingness to die for the Republic.
On July 17, 1791, the Marquis de Lafayette raised a plain red flag over the Champ de Mars in Paris to declare martial law against rioters, a bloody episode that nonetheless cemented red's link to popular uprising.
Vivienne Westwood, in her 1970s/80s punk designs (through the SEX and Seditionaries shops with Malcolm McLaren), deliberately used red alongside anarchist and Situationist imagery, consciously drawing on protest iconography.