Colours of love and desire

On Easter Monday boys sprinkle girls with water or perfume and are given painted eggs in return. The classic egg is plain red, piros tojas.

It is a custom to wear new red underwear on New Year's Eve for luck and love in the coming year. Shop windows fill with it in December.

Traditional embroidered shirts, vyshyvanky, are most often stitched in red and black. A well-loved song says that red is for love and black is for sorrow.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez kept a yellow rose on his desk for luck, and yellow butterflies follow a lover in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Readers mourned him with yellow paper butterflies.

Yellow is the colour of Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre, patron of Cuba, and of Ochun, the Santeria spirit of rivers and love. Pilgrims bring her sunflowers.

A yellow ribbon tied round a tree or pinned to a coat means someone is waiting for a loved one to come home. It spread during the Iran hostage crisis of 1979 to 1981.

To "wear a green hat" is a Chinese phrase for a man whose wife is unfaithful. For that reason men avoid green hats, and they make a poor gift.

Green has a bawdy sense in Spanish. A chiste verde is a dirty joke, and a viejo verde is a lecherous old man.

The blue flower, die blaue Blume, comes from a novel by Novalis. It became the emblem of German Romanticism and stands for longing for what cannot be reached.

Purple is tied to the old capital, Hue, where schoolgirls and women were known for violet ao dai. In songs and poems it is the colour of faithful, wistful love.

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.