Cerise (color)

Cerise (/səˈriːs/ or /səˈriːz/; French pronunciation: ​[səˈʁiz]) is a deep to vivid reddish pink.

Etymology

The color name comes from the French word "cerise", meaning cherry. The word "cherry" itself comes from the Norman cherise.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded use of cerise as a color name in English was in The Times of November 30, 1858. This date of 1858 as the date of first use of the color name is also mentioned in the 1930 book A Dictionary of Color. However, it was used at least as early as 1845 in a book of crochet patterns.

Distinction between the colors cerise and cherry red

In the 1930 book A Dictionary of Color it is pointed out that the color cerise has always been depicted as a somewhat bluer color than the actual color of a fresh uncooked cherry, which is denoted by a different redder color called cherry red. Basically, the color cerise is a depiction of the somewhat bluer color of a cooked cherry, such as the cherries in a cherry pie.

Color

Color (American English) or colour (Commonwealth English) is the visual perceptual property corresponding in humans to the categories called red, blue, yellow, etc. Color derives from the spectrum of light (distribution of light power versus wavelength) interacting in the eye with the spectral sensitivities of the light receptors. Color categories and physical specifications of color are also associated with objects or materials based on their physical properties such as light absorption, reflection, or emission spectra. By defining a color space colors can be identified numerically by their coordinates.

Because perception of color stems from the varying spectral sensitivity of different types of cone cells in the retina to different parts of the spectrum, colors may be defined and quantified by the degree to which they stimulate these cells. These physical or physiological quantifications of color, however, do not fully explain the psychophysical perception of color appearance.

The science of color is sometimes called chromatics, colorimetry, or simply color science. It includes the perception of color by the human eye and brain, the origin of color in materials, color theory in art, and the physics of electromagnetic radiation in the visible range (that is, what we commonly refer to simply as light).