Pink and magenta

The president's office in Buenos Aires is the Casa Rosada, the Pink House. A popular story says its paint once had ox blood mixed in, though this is not proven.

The third day of the New Year's Test at the Sydney Cricket Ground is Jane McGrath Day. The crowd wears pink to raise money for breast cancer nurses.

The Rose Valley near Kazanlak grows pink damask roses for rose oil. The harvest in late May and June is marked by a festival and the crowning of a Rose Queen.

Toulouse is called la Ville Rose, the pink city, for the soft pink brick of its old buildings.

In November 2003 protesters entered parliament carrying roses, and the president resigned without bloodshed. The change of power is called the Rose Revolution.

At Holi, the spring festival of colours, friends and strangers smear each other with gulal, a coloured powder. Pink and red gulal are the best known shades.

The leader of the Giro d'Italia cycle race wears the maglia rosa, the pink jersey. It matches the pink paper of La Gazzetta dello Sport, which founded the race.

Petra, carved into sandstone cliffs by the Nabataeans, is known as the rose-red city, from a line in a nineteenth-century English poem.

Pale pink is the colour of cherry blossom. In spring people picnic under the trees for hanami, flower viewing, and the short bloom is a common image for how brief life is.

Buddhist nuns, called thilashin, shave their heads and wear pale pink robes with an orange or brown under-robe.

Rosa mexicano is a strong, hot pink. The designer Ramon Valdiosera made it known abroad in the 1940s, and it is seen in textiles, sweets and the walls of Luis Barragan's houses.

The Homomonument in Amsterdam is made of three triangles of pink granite. It turns the pink triangle, the Nazi camp badge for gay men, into a memorial.

In the 2022 presidential election, supporters of Leni Robredo dressed in pink and painted murals in it. The colour was picked up by volunteers, not chosen by the campaign.

Lake Retba, near Dakar, is known as Lac Rose, the pink lake. Salt-loving algae turn the water pink in the dry season, and workers gather salt from its bed.

Pink is Tuesday's colour. When King Bhumibol left hospital in 2007 in a pink blazer, pink shirts sold out as people wore them to wish him good health.

Indo-Trinidadians celebrate Holi as Phagwa. People gather in open fields to sing chowtal songs and drench each other in a purple-pink dye called abir.

The pink ribbon has stood for breast cancer awareness since the early 1990s. Each October, sports teams and shops turn pink for the cause.

Pink for girls and blue for boys became the firm rule in American shops only around the middle of the twentieth century. Earlier advice was mixed and sometimes the other way round.

In the north, pink peach blossom is the flower of Tet. Families in Hanoi buy a flowering branch or small tree for the house before the holiday.